Intro to Photography Course 5/10/21

Intro to Photography Course 8/11/21

Welcome to Visual Arts

Open Ended

List all of the ways you think photography can be useful in society.

Let's Get Into A Brief History of Photography

Make sure you pay attention to the following slides. You'll need to answer some questions and be able to identify and discuss at least one fact you found interesting at the end of the lesson.

There is also an accompanying video in Blackboard for you to watch that gives a little more detail about the following slides.

A Brief History of Photography

The coining of the word "photography" is usually attributed to Sir John Herschel in 1839. It is based on the Greek meaning "light", and "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light".

Earliest Photos

The history of photography has roots in remote antiquity with the discovery of the principle of the camera obscura and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light.

World's earliest surviving 

camera photograph

• In the mid-1820s, Nicéphore Niépce succeeded, but several days of exposure in the camera were required and the earliest results were very crude.

• 1826 or 1827: 

  View from the Window at Le Gras

Birth of Photography

Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced photographic process, which required only minutes of exposure in the camera and produced clear, finely detailed results. It was commercially introduced in 1839, a date generally accepted as the birth year of practical photography.

Early Photos

The early days were all about experimentation, like any new invention. Holding still was a big deal early on.

Where’s the color?

A practical means of color photography was sought from the very beginning. Results were demonstrated by Edmond Becquerel as early as 1848, but exposures lasting for hours or days were required and the captured colors were so light-sensitive they would only bear very brief inspection in dim light.

Where’s the color?

The first durable color photograph was a set of three black-and-white photographs taken through red, green and blue color filters and shown superimposed by using three projectors with similar filters. It was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861.

Autochrome

The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, commercially introduced in 1907.

Autochrome plates had an integral mosaic filter layer composed of millions of dyed potato starch grains. Reversal processing was used to develop each plate into a transparent positive that could be viewed directly or projected with an ordinary projector.

Gorilla Snot

A new era in color photography began with the introduction of Kodachrome film, available for 16mm home movies in 1935 and 35 mm slides in 1936. It captured the red, green and blue color components in three layers of emulsion. A complex processing operation produced complementary cyan, magenta and yellow dye images in those layers, resulting in a subtractive color image.

Your Parents Film

Photographic film is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film. This is 35mm film.

The Polaroid

In 1983 Polaroid introduced an "instant" transparency system for still photography. The unexposed 35mm films came with their own processing pack. The films were processed within a dedicated, hand-powered, mechanical-cranked processing machine called an "AutoProcessor," into which an exposed film and its processing pack had to be loaded. The time to get from an exposed undeveloped film to a fully developed film ready for mounting varied from between two and five minutes, depending on the type of film.

Going Digital

• In 1957, a team led by Russell A. Kirsch developed a binary digital version of an existing technology, the wirephoto drum scanner, so that alphanumeric characters, diagrams, photographs and other graphics could be transferred into digital computer memory. One of the first photographs scanned was at a resolution of 176x176 pixels with only one bit per pixel, i.e., stark black and white with no intermediate gray tones.

• 1973 - Fairchild Semiconductor releases the first

  large image-capturing CCD chip: 100 rows and

• 100 columns.

  1986 - Kodak scientists develop the world's

  first megapixel sensor.

Digital. Web. Social.

The web has been a popular medium for storing and sharing photos ever since the first photograph was published on the web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. Today popular sites such as Google Photos, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Flickr and more are used by hundreds of millions of people to share their pictures. 

Open Ended

What was one interesting fact from this presentation that you can share with someone who isn't in the class? What did you find surprising and/or exciting?

Multiple Choice

The first photograph was taken in 1826 by _____________________.

• Abelardo Morell
• Professor J Schulze
• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
• Mozi

Multiple Choice

What historical phenomenon showed that light travels in straight lines and when they reflect from a subject through a small hole they cross and form upside down images? 

• Camera Obscura
• Aperture
• Photosensitive Compound
• Nikon