The Evolution of Photography | From It's Inception
Photography is the art of creating an image by catching light with a camera, usually using a digital sensor or film.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce of France took the first permanent image in 1826 (other accounts state 1827). It depicts the sun shining on a building's roof (see below)
I am going to take you on a journey from the start till present on the evolution of photography.
First Photo Ever taken (Source: Harry Ransom Center - University of Texas)
First let’s talk about Famous Photographers
The history of photography has always been a story about individuals - artists and inventors who helped propel the art into the modern world.
I can write about many names here but below are the three photographers which made a significant impact in the photography world. Below are the few famous names their breakthroughs, innovations, thoughts, and photographs continue to influence our own images, till date.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
A French inventor who is often credited with inventing photography and being a pioneer in the discipline.
In 1825, Niépce invented heliography, which he used to create the world's oldest surviving photographic product: a print generated from a photoengraved printing plate. He used a crude camera to create the first known photograph of a real-world scene in 1826 or 1827.
Niepce created the first permanent record of his work in 1827. He captured an eight-hour exposure from his bedroom window using a bitumen-coated plate. After that, the plate was cleaned with a solvent and put over a box of iodine, resulting in a plate with both bright and dark characteristics. The resultant image was given the name Heliograph by Niepce. This photograph is now housed in the Gernsheim collection at the University of Texas at Austin's research center.
In the same year, Niepce was advised to meet with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, a theatrical painter, to discuss his innovation. Niepce and Daguerre formed a partnership and signed a ten-year contract; however, Niepce died four years later.
In Chalon, France, there is a statue and a museum devoted to Niepce. When the International Photography Hall of Fame was founded in 1966, Niepce was one of the first photographers to be admitted.
Louis Daguerre
Daguerre was a French painter and physicist who devised the first practical photographic method, the daguerreotype.
Niepce formed a partnership with a Parisian artist named Louis Daguerre and undertook further research and improvement of his method. Sadly, Niepce died in 1833, but he fortunately left all of his notes to Daguerre, who continued to work. Louis preferred silver-based methods and utilized silver-coated plates that had been subjected to iodine vapors. The iodine interacted with the silver on the plates, resulting in a photosensitive silver iodide layer.
The revelation that by introducing mercury vapors to the exposed silver plate, he could actually make the "latent" image visible on the plate, decreasing the lengthy exposure durations of prior processes, was Daguerre's key advance. Exposures could now be measured in minutes rather than days. The Daguerreotype was named after Daguerre's process of developing silver iodide emulsed plates using mercury vapor.
Dorothea Lange
An American documentary photographer and photojournalist
During the Great Depression, Lange began photographing the unemployed men who roamed San Francisco's streets. Pictures like White Angel Breadline (1932), which depicted the sad state of these guys, were publicly shown and gained immediate acclaim from the public as well as other photographers, particularly members of Group f.64.
These photos also resulted in a commission from the federal Resettlement Administration in 1935. (later called the Farm Security Administration [FSA]). The latter agency, formed by the United States Department of Agriculture, thought that Lange's stunning photos would bring the rural poor's plight to the public's notice.
Her photographs of migrant workers, with whom she lived for a period, were frequently accompanied by captions that included the workers' own words. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), deemed by FSA director Roy Stryker to be the emblematic representation of the agency's goal. The piece is now on display at the Library of Congress.
Ansel Adams
An American landscape photographer and environmentalist whose black-and-white photographs of the American West are well-known
By 1935, Adams had become well-known in the photography world, thanks to a series of papers he had written for major photography magazines, particularly Camera Craft. These articles were largely technical in nature, and they provided a new level of clarity and rigor to photography's practical issues. It was most likely because of these pieces that Studio Publications (London) commissioned Adams to write Making a Photograph (1935), a manual to photographic technique illustrated mostly with his own photographs.
This book was a huge hit, thanks in part to the incredible quality of the letterpress reproductions, which were printed separately from the text and tipped into the book pages. The quality of these copies was such that they were sometimes mistaken for real prints.
Adams had already defined the subject matter—the natural surroundings of his favorite West Coast—and the immaculate, technically flawless style that characterizes his continuous output by the time Making a Photograph was released. His focus for the fleeting and ephemeral distinguishes his work from that of his famous 19th-century predecessors who photographed the American West—most notably, Carleton Watkins.
Watkins may have shot the geology of the area, whereas Adams may have captured the weather. His great love of the landscape in microcosm stemmed from this keen attention to the minutiae of the physical world, in which a detail of the forest floor might be as moving as a vast view. His work on this one prolonged subject elicits a surprising range of emotions, from childlike awe to languorous pleasure, biblical thrill of nature in a storm, and realization of a severe and austere natural reality in which human values are not always fulfilled.
The contrast between the benign generosity of the valley, with its cold, clear water and abundant flora, and the dry, unfriendly stringency of the Sierra's eastern slope, could be seen in Adams' art.
To check out his official gallery Click Here
Yousef Karsh
Unquestionably the best and most renowned portrait photographer in the world.
Armenian by birth, but claimed as our own by Canadians. Unquestionably the best and most renowned portrait photographer in world. He not only photographed 51 of the century's most famous persons (as selected by International Who's Who in 2000), but he was also included on the list! His legendary portrait of Winston Churchill catapulted him to stardom, and he went on to capture world leaders, royalty, Hollywood celebrities, artists, religious leaders, and anybody else of note.
Click Here for the famous Churchill shot
The First Portrait
Time to go back in history and try to see when was the first-time humans were photographed.
Robert Cornelius (Source: Wikimedia)
This photograph is widely regarded as the earliest ever intentional portrait of a human being. Robert Cornelius, an American who worked in metal polishing and silver plating, is the subject of this shot as well as the photographer. Cornelius had developed an interest in the Daguerreotype process and tried to improve it by using his knowledge of chemistry and metallurgical composition to the technique.
Cornelius stood outside his family's store in perhaps October or November of 1839 and took the first of many selfies. He wrote, "The first light picture ever taken" on the back of the photograph. Cornelius was correct in that his photograph will go down in history as the first time a person was deliberately photographed using light, even if it wasn't fully accurate.
Cornelius was unaware that an image had already been created that contained humans, despite the fact that this was not the initial intent. The evolution of photography had already made one of its most significant steps forward around two years prior. Daguerre captured the crowded Boulevard du Temple in Paris in the spring of 1838.
Due to motion, everything that was moving vanished from the frame due to the long exposure duration. There were only two persons in the photo: a man having his boots shined and the shiner. Those two people would have no idea that they were the first humans ever photographed.
The first photo in history with humans (Source: Wikimedia)
Along Came Prints
The photographs were direct positives and unique and were not re-printable; meaning that the only means of creating a copy of an existing print was to produce a photograph of that particular print. If they were re-printable, such as the calotype, the detail and contrast were not particularly significant. The year is somewhere around 1850 and Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor by trade, has been photographing his sculptures using the talbotype/calotype technique. He discovers that the photos generated using this approach weren’t of adequate quality for his purposes. So what does one do when one finds himself in such a scenario? Well, he invents a whole new photography technique. The new method Fred devised was termed the collodion process.
The technique of collodion print creation is simply the usage of some sort of hard material (most frequently glass) that was then washed in a collodion mixture that had been combined with silver bromide or silver iodide. The consequence was that the photosensitive silver compound was suspended within the collodion on the surface of the plate.
Maybe one of the more immediately recognized tastes of the collodion process is that of the tintype. Two men, Hamilton Smith of America and William Kloen of Great Britain, patented the technique at practically the same time in the year of 1856. The tintype became common as the photography technique by which most photographs from the American Civil War and many of the “old-timey” classical images we admire from the Victorian era were created. The method utilized a thin ferrous plate (iron… not truly tin) that had been lacquered black. The coated chunk of iron was then processed with a wet or dry exposure of silver halide and collodion emulsion. The later dry process became the far more popular approach as it permitted plates to be processed before they were needed to produce a photograph.
Advancement was also rapid and for the first occasion, photographers were capable of creating photographs in a couple of minutes from beginning to end. The prints were also far more lasting than any other photographs which came before them allowing pictures to be carried in coat pockets and ladies’ purses.
The era of 35mm
The year: 1925. During this period, photography was still the realm of medium and large format cameras. The most popular portable camera of the day was the Kodak Box Brownie.
Kodak Brownie No.2 Model F (1924) (Source:Wikimedia)
The Brownie was indeed wonderful progress since it offered consumers an easy and inexpensive alternative to the huge and cumbersome plate cameras. Though comparatively small and in roll style, the film used in the Brownie nevertheless measured 5.6 inches square each frame. Introducing Oskar Barnack from Germany, an optical engineer and inventor. Oskar unveiled two breakthrough… First, he is the inventor of the Leitz Camera… more commonly known as the powerful Leica.
The Leica was small in size. The reason for the comparatively small size of the Leica was owing to the use of the George Eastman’s dry emulsion roll photographic film in 135 format (35mm). The 35mm film roll is going to dominate the photography business for the next seventy-five years and will be utilized in point and shoot, rangefinders, and SLR cameras. Canisters of 35mm film will become the gold-standard for photographers from amateur to pro.
7Leica I, 1927 (Source:Wikimedia)
Let’s Fill Colors
There were numerous distinct methods created throughout the following decades between 1850 and 1900. The Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell wrote a study on optical color vision and perception in 1855.
The study claimed that humans perceive color through a myriad of cone shaped cells placed on the surface of the back portion of our eyes. Maxwell stated that various regions on these cells are sensitive to red, blue, and green light spectrums and it was this combinations of colors which were responsible for our perception of the colors around us. This approach, termed the “three color process” or “RGB” is the cornerstone of nearly every color photographic methods we have with us now. Now that the anatomical science of how humans perceive color was being more established, it was time for the evolution of color photography to begin. The earliest known image made following the principles laid out by J.C. Maxwell was shot in 1861 by Thomas Sutton, an English photographer and scientist. The shot was produced by stacking three black and white photos which were itself individually exposed using red, green, and blue filters. The picture could then be viewed in color as a superimposition from three different projectors which each utilized a corresponding green, red, or blue filter. Yeah, it was just that simple. Below you can see is the first know colored photographed taken and this event was the kick off point of the world of colored photography which will bring so many great innovation as we see nowdays.
First Known Color Photograph (Source: Wikimedia)
By 1950 tremendous improvements have been achieved and color photography is becoming the most sought after and now commonly available photographic mediums. People enjoy viewing the world in live color and most especially themselves. This is a moment when Edwin Land comes onto the scene and he disrupted the photography world with his ideas and he co-founded of the famous company named Polaroid.
The limitless number of color variations recorded by the human eye can be replicated using the proper intensities of three colors: red, green, and blue. The complimentary dyes cyan, magenta, and yellow are used to develop them in a photograph. Land and his crew began working with standard color photography technologies in the late 1940s, but they soon learned to adapt to the tight limits and short timescales required for Polaroid color photography.
After several years of work on the project, the team was inspired by project leader Howard Rogers (1915–1995)'s proposal for a new sort of chemical that would enable them to entirely revise the color producing process. Instead of utilizing individual dye and developer molecules for each of the three colors used in film, Rogers suggested and subsequently oversaw the development of dye developers, which combined the two components. These new molecules served two purposes: they improved the overall film unit and they simplified it.
Polaroid chemists not only tested hundreds of new molecules to ensure that their new film had acceptable colors, but they also coordinated the chain of chemical processes that took place within the film unit. From the negative layer to the positive photographic print, each color took a different course of development. For appropriate color creation, the timing of these chemical motions was critical. Land kept his 60-second development targets, as well as shelf- and temperature-stability and permanency.
Polaroid had overcome numerous difficulties by 1962, including brightening color dyes and equipping facilities for commercial manufacturing, but picture persistence remained a concern. The alkaline developer molecules, which are required to dissolve the dye developers, were transported to the positive layer with the dyes, where they quickly began to degrade the final picture.
Finally, the researchers tackled the issue by embedding acid molecules in a layer of polymer on the positive sheet, where they would react with alkaline developer molecules as soon as the picture development process was done. As a result, the acid and base interacted, creating water in the film and securing the dyes.
In 1963, Polaroid released its first color film. Polaroid film sales grew sixfold in the next decade, despite already being on the rise. Color instant photography was a huge commercial and technological triumph for Polaroid.
The digital camera disruption
The first digital camera, was created in 1975 by Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer, was a rather primitive device relative to what we use today.
To begin with, it was mostly assembled from pieces of kit and scraps strewn around the Kodak facility - with the exception of the ingenious image sensor, of course.
The first digital camera ( Source: Wikimedia)
Second, 0.01-megapixel black-and-white pictures were captured and stored on a cassette tape. Oh, and capturing a single photograph took 23 seconds.
Still, this was space age technology in 1975, and Steve Sasson launched an image revolution that would change the world of photography forever.
The Fuji DS-1P is often regarded as the first commercially produced portable digital camera, however it was never sold to the general public. It was released in 1988 and used a 2MB SRAM memory card to store its pictures. Three years later, in 1991, Kodak stepped up its game with the Kodak DCS, a $13,000 USD camera with a "huge" 1.3 megapixel optical sensor. Minolta, not to be outdone, was the first to develop a portable digital SLR camera in 1995, ushering in the DSLR era. The Minolta RD-175, which was based on the Minolta 500si camera body, offered photographers the option of employing a 1.75 megapixel sensor.
The Nikon D-1 allowed photographers to utilize existing film cameras' lenses on their new DSLR, which had a 2.74 megapixel sensor, all for approximately $6,000 USD.
And since then digital photography saw new innovations every now and then which led to Mirrorless cameras and this current age.
Conclusion.
I know this post is long so I am not going to take much more time. It fascinates me to imagine how it all began with the heliograph and how many photographers and innovators contributed to the field of photography after that. The progress of technology in photography has altered the game. Gone are the days of huge DSLR cameras; now we even have cameras with incredible quality in our cameras, making photography more accessible to the majority of the people. I believe we are going to see some more great innovations in this field.
What do you think the next major breakthrough in photography will be?