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History
- What is Photography?
PHOTOGRAPHY.
The
word photography comes from two ancient Greek words: photo, for
"light," and graph, for "drawing." "Drawing with light" is a
way of describing photography. When a photograph is made, light or some other
form of radiant energy, such as X rays, is used to record a picture of an
object or scene on a light-sensitive surface. Early photographs were called
sun pictures, because sunlight itself was used to create the
image. Mankind has been a maker of images at least since
the cave paintings of some 20,000 years ago. With the invention of
photography, a realistic image that would have taken a skilled artist hours
or even days to draw could be recorded in exact detail within a fraction of a
second.
Today,
photography has become a powerful means of communication and a mode of visual expression that touches human life in many ways. For
example, photography has become popular as a means of crystallizing
memories. Most of the billions of photographs taken today
are snapshots--casual records
to document personal events such as vacations, birthdays, and weddings.
Photographs are used extensively by newspapers, magazines,
books, and television to convey information and advertise products and
services. Practical applications of photography are found
in nearly every human endeavor from astronomy to medical diagnosis to
industrial quality control. Photography extends human vision into the realm
of objects that are invisible because they are too small or too distant, or
events that occur too rapidly for the naked eye to detect. A camera can be
used in locations too dangerous for humans. Photographs can also be objects
of art that explore the human condition and provide aesthetic pleasure. For
millions of people, photography is a satisfying hobby or a rewarding career.
Today
photography is widely recognized as a fine art. Photographs are displayed in
art museums, prized by collectors, discussed by critics, and studied in art
history courses. Because of the special nature of photography, however, this
was not always the case. In the early days of photography some people
considered the medium something of a poor relation to the older, established
visual arts, such as drawing and painting. The arguments
stemmed from the fact that a camera is a mechanical instrument. Because the
mechanical procedure of taking a picture is automatic, detractors claimed
that photography required no coordination of hand and eye and none of the
manual skills essential to drawing and painting. They also argued that
photography required no creativity or imagination because the photographic
subject was "ready-made" and did not require manipulation or
control by the photographer.
A
camera, no matter how many automatic features it may have, is a lifeless
piece of equipment until a person uses it. It then becomes a uniquely
responsive tool--an extension of the
photographer's eye and mind. A photographer creates a picture
by a process of selection. Photographers looking through the camera's
viewfinder must decide what to include and what to exclude from the scene.
They select the distance from which to take the picture and the precise angle
that best suits their purpose. They select the instant in which to trip the
shutter. This decision may require hours of patient waiting until the light
is exactly right or it may be a split-second decision, but the photographer's
sense of timing is always crucial. Photographers can expand
or flatten perspective by the use of certain lenses. They can freeze motion
or record it as a blur, depending on their choice of shutter speed. They can
create an infinite number of lighting effects with flashes or floodlights.
They can alter the tonal values or colors in a picture by their choice of
film and filters. These are only a few of the controls available to a
photographer when taking a picture. Later, in the darkroom, many additional
choices are available.
One of
the best ways to view artistic photographs is to visit museums. Today most
art museums include photography exhibitions, and many have a photography
department and a permanent collection of photographic prints. This is a
relatively recent development. Another great way to view photographs is
to look at a quality magaznie like National Geograpics.
Control of Light
Camera Obscura The camera
obscura had been known since ancient times. It was first detailed in writing
by artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. Meaning literally
"darkened room," it was originally a room completely sealed from
light except for a very small hole in one wall. An image of the outside
world--houses, trees, and even people--could be projected, upside down and
reversed right-to-left, onto a wall or white screen placed opposite the
opening. Later the camera obscura was reduced in size until
it became a small portable box. It was equipped with a lens and a mirror at a
45-degree angle, which reflected the image upward and focused it on a viewing
screen. This was a great aid to artists in making sketches on location, but
there was not yet a way to capture directly and permanently the camera
obscura's images.
Making the Image
Permanent
Scientists
had known for some time that certain silver compounds, then called silver
salts and now named silver halides, would turn black when exposed to light.
In England, Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter, experimented with one
of these silver halides, silver nitrate, to produce silhouettes. The
pictures, however, were not permanent and turned black unless stored in the
dark.
1.Niepce
In the early 19th century Joseph-Nicephore Niepce of France began to
experiment with a then novel graphic arts printing method called lithography.
His work led him to further experiments using bitumen, a resinous substance,
and oil of lavender. Niepce developed a process whereby he could permanently
capture the image of a camera obscura. In 1827 he made the world's first
surviving photograph from the window of a country home in France. It required
an exposure, in bright sunlight, of eight hours.
2.Daguerre
Meanwhile, Daguerre was experimenting with silver-iodide images.
Hearing of Niepce's work, he contacted him, and in 1829 they became partners.
During the next few years Daguerre, with Niepce's help, worked out the
process that came to be known as daguerreotypy. It was a complicated
procedure that demanded considerable skill. A silver-coated sheet of copper
was sensitized by treatment with iodine vapor, forming a coating of
light-sensitive silver iodide. The daguerreotype plate was exposed in the
camera and then developed in mercury fumes at temperatures of about 120
degrees F (50 degrees C). The exposed areas absorbed mercury atoms and
highlighted the image. Finally, the image was fixed by washing it in
hypo. The daguerreotype's silver image was capable of rendering exquisitely
fine detail. It was a single-image process, however--each exposure produced
only one picture, incapable of reproduction. Furthermore, the process
required exposures of up to several minutes even in bright sunlight, thus
constraining its subjects to absolute motionlessness. In
spite of this, the process immediately became popular, particularly for
portraiture. Daguerreotypy rapidly developed into a thriving business in
England and the United States. Superb portraits were made by such daguerreotypists
as Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes in Boston. The French
excelled in landscapes and cityscapes. In 1840 a much faster lens
was designed by the Hungarian Jozsef Petzval and manufactured by Peter
Voigtlander in Austria. At about the same time a method was discovered that
increased considerably the light sensitivity of the daguerreotype plate. This
method involved a second fuming with chlorine or bromine before exposure.
3.TalbotIn England William Henry Fox Talbot had developed
his own method of photography at about the same time that Daguerre was
inventing the daguerreotype. Talbot impregnated paper with silver nitrate or
silver chloride. When exposed in a camera, the sensitized paper turned black
where light struck it, creating a negative image of the subject. This was
made permanent by fixing with hypo. To achieve a positive image,
a contact print could be made by placing the negative over a second piece of
sensitized paper and exposing the combination to bright light. Talbot's "photogenic
drawings," as he called them, lacked the daguerreotype's sharp detail
and brilliance but offered the great advantage that from one negative a large
number of positive prints could be made. His process, known as the calotype,
and later talbotype, process, was at first less popular than the
daguerreotype. Most later methods of photography, however, have evolved from
Talbot's work. His was the first negative-positive process.
4.ArcherIn 1851 F. Scott Archer of
England made public his wet-collodion
process, in which he used a glass plate coated with collodion as a base for
light-sensitive silver halides. His procedure, requiring seven steps, was
only slightly less complicated than the daguerreotype process, but it was
considerably less expensive. It also produced a negative that was much
sharper than that of the calotype method. Soon the wet-collodion process had
supplanted both the older techniques as the most widely used process of
photography. A major inconvenience of the wet-collodion method was the fact
that the plate was light-sensitive only as long as it remained wet; after it dried it lost its sensitivity.
Thus plates had to be used almost immediately after preparation. Since these
plates could not be prepared and stockpiled in advance, a portable darkroom,
in the form of a tent, wagon, or railway car, for instance, had to accompany
the camera wherever it went.
C.
Reportage & Early Pioneers
Despite
this drawback, intrepid photographers made photographs in remote locations
and under the most dangerous conditions, creating images that are still
considered masterpieces of the medium. Roger Fenton of England became a pioneer in war photography with
his camp scenes from the Crimean War. Mathew
Brady and his team of associates, including Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and James Gibson,
achieved a magnificent documentation of the American Civil War . After the
war, Gardner, O'Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson photographed the opening
of the American West and provided a lasting record of its awesome scenery.
In the
mid-1850s the tintype, an
inexpensive imitation of the daguerreotype, was patented by the American
Hamilton L. Smith. It was, in fact, not made of tin, but of a very thin sheet
of iron specially treated and coated with a light-sensitive emulsion. The
tintype became very popular for personal portraits.
Stereoscopic photography also became extremely popular during
this period. A special stereo camera with two lenses was used to take two
simultaneous photographs of the subject from viewpoints separated by about
the same distance as a pair of human eyes. When the resulting pictures were
viewed through a special viewing device, they merged to create a
three-dimensional image. Stereoscopic images of travel pictures, landscapes,
important events, and comic pictorial short stories were sold by the
millions.
In 1871 a new era in photography began
when an amateur English photographer, R.L. Maddox, produced a successful dry plate that retained its
light-sensitivity after drying. Other inventors followed his lead, and soon
fast, reliable dry plates, much more convenient to use than the earlier wet
plates, became available at a reasonable cost.
The dry plate represented a turning point in
photography. With
the availability of faster emulsions, photographers could make exposures on
the order of a fraction of a second, and for the first time the camera was
freed from a stand. A new breed of smaller, more portable cameras
proliferated, variously called hand cameras or detective cameras. With
fast-dry plates, and later with film, photography could be practiced by
amateurs without the need for professional training or equipment.
As shutter speeds became fast enough to stop motion, a fascinating new world
of vision unfolded. Especially notable was the work of the Englishman Eadweard Muybridge,
who pioneered work in the field of motion-picture
projection. He photographed sequences of human and animal motion that
fascinated artists, anatomists, and the general public alike.
In the 1880s the American George Eastman
put flexible roll film on the
market, and in 1889 he introduced the first Kodak camera with the slogan,
"You push the button and we do the rest." Thus was launched the era
of mass-market photography. Meanwhile, gifted photographers were
exploring the new medium from a creative standpoint, attempting to discover
its potential and limitations and define photography as an art form. At first
it was only natural that photographers should take their inspiration from
painting. Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, for example, working
in England, used various darkroom techniques, tricks, and manipulations to
produce staged photographs that frankly imitated the sentimental, moralistic
paintings of the era.
The
English amateur Julia Margaret Cameron
did not take up photography until she was almost 50. Nevertheless, she
imposed her own personal style on the medium and produced a collection of
extraordinary portraits that were soft focused but impassioned. Another
English amateur, Peter Henry Emerson, developed a strong pictorial style of
his own and advanced detailed theories of photographic aesthetics that had a
considerable influence on late 19th-century art photographers.
The
American Alfred Stieglitz,
a distinguished photographer in his own right, began to promote photography
as a fine art in the pages of his illustrated quarterly Camera Work, in his
Photo-Secession group, and later in his 291 gallery.
E. A New Generation of
Photographers
A new
generation of photographers emerged who were determined to turn away from the
pictorial style and its soft-focus, painterly effects to a more direct,
unmanipulated, and sharply focused approach. This new form was called
"straight" photography, and its practitioners believed it most
truly expressed photography's unique vision. One pioneer was Paul Strand,
whose photographs reveal a deep awareness of what he called "the spirit
of place." The movement's most famous figures were Edward Weston and his
younger associate Ansel Adams .
Fenton, Roger (1819-69). English. Best known
for his pictures of the Crimean War, which constituted the first extensive
photographic coverage of a war. Fenton established his reputation through his
high-quality still lifes and landscapes. In 1853 he founded the (Royal)
Photographic Society of London. He was sent to the Crimea in 1855 as the
British government's official photographer.
Heartfield, John (1891-1968). German. Original name Helmut
Herzfelde. Initially a Dadaist, Heartfield was one of the greatest masters of
photomontage. Violent contrasts of scale and perspective, ruthless cropping
of heads and bodies, the substitution of machine parts for vital organs, and
other seeming illogical juxtapositions had a shocking effect. During the
German Third Reich, Heartfield's anti-Fascist montages were among the
strongest protests made.
Hine, Lewis (1874-1940). American. A master of composition
and mood, Hine used his camera in the cause of social reform. In 1908 he
published a pictorial record of Ellis Island immigrants. In 1911 he was hired
by the National Child Labor Committee, and he used his photographic
documentation of child labor abuses to bring about corrective legislation.
Hine recorded the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930. The
photographs were published in 1932 in a book titled `Men at Work'.
Jackson, William Henry (1843-1942). American. One of
the best-known Western landscape and Indian portrait photographers in the
19th century. From 1870 to 1878 he was the official photographer for the
United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. His
photographs of Wyoming were instrumental in the establishment of Yellowstone
National Park in 1872.
F. Technical
Development
Technical
developments in photographic equipment continued. Shortly before World War I,
Oskar Barnack in Germany, working as a technician for the E. Leitz company, invented a miniature
camera that used perforated strips of 35-mm film. It was first introduced to
the market in 1924 as the Leica. Many dismissed it as a mere toy ill-equipped
for serious work, but others were delighted by its compact size and ability
to make up to 36 exposures in rapid succession.
Continual
improvement over the years established the 35-mm camera, especially in its
single-lens reflex form, as the dominant camera for both professionals and
serious amateurs. In 1930 the highly dangerous flashpowder was
largely supplanted by flashbulbs. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
experiments with gas discharge flash tubes led to the development of the
electronic flash, which could produce astonishing images made at exposures as
brief as 1/10,000 second. Although they originally required expensive and
cumbersome equipment, electronic flash units became so miniaturized that they
could be built into a pocket camera.
Color
had been the dream of photographers since the medium of photography was
invented. The foundation for color photography had been established in 1859
by James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist who demonstrated that all colors
could be reduced to combinations of three primary colors. Many attempts were
made to apply this principle to photography, but it was not until many
decades later that inventors were successful.
In 1907 two Frenchmen, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, placed on the
market their autochrome glass plates. These plates were coated with starch
grains that were dyed red, green, and blue, over which was a second coating
of panchromatic emulsion. After 1930 the much sharper "integral
tripack" color films were introduced, which used dyes rather than
grains.
Kodachrome in particular became famed for its sharpness and
rich colors. These new films were positive transparency films, but soon color
negative films were introduced. Today color negative film constitutes the
vast majority of film sold to amateur photographers in the United
States. Instant, or self-processing, photography was invented by
the American Edwin H. Land. He
introduced the Polaroid Land camera in 1947, and a color version became
available in 1963.
I.
Photography in Communication
Since
its invention in 1839, photography's unique powers of visual description have
been used to record, report, and inform. People prefer to see things with
their own eyes, but when this is impossible the camera can often serve the
same purpose almost as well. It is not true that photographs never lie--they
can be falsified and manipulated. Nevertheless, a photograph can carry a
strong measure of authenticity and conviction.
As a
nonverbal means of communication, photography can surmount the barriers of
language and communicate through universal visual symbols.
Photographs are well suited for use in the mass media. Today they are
reproduced by the billions, and they can be found everywhere: in the pages of
newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs, and brochures; on display in
billboards, shop windows, and posters; broadcast over television; and
organized into slide shows and film strips.
In
photography's early days some of its most eagerly sought images were those
brought back by explorers and travelers. These would satisfy people's
curiosity about distant places like China, Egypt, and the American West. That
same kind of curiosity exists today. People are fascinated with photographs
of the surface of the moon, the landscape of Mars, and the appearance of
other planets in the solar system.
Photographs
in the mass-communication media have made the faces of political leaders,
popular entertainers, and other celebrities familiar to the public. When a
newsworthy event occurs photojournalists are there to record it.
Photojournalists sometimes spend months covering a story. The result of such
labor is often a powerful, revealing picture essay that probes far beneath
the surface of events.
Photography
is also essential to the advertising industry. In efforts to sell a product,
attractive photographs of the item are used. Photography is also widely used
in education and training within the academic world, industry, and the armed
services.
Photographs
are also often used in attempts to sway public opinion. Governments,
political parties, and special-interest groups have long used the graphic
representation and emotional impact of photographs to further their causes.
Such use may result in destructive propaganda, such as that of the Nazis
during the Third Reich.
Photography
can also help to bring about desirable changes. Photographs of the
Yellowstone region were instrumental in Congress's decision to establish that
area as a national park, and photographs of child laborers helped to bring
about legislation protecting children from exploitation.
Videography refers to the
process of capturing moving images on electronic media
(e.g., videotape,
direct to disk recording, or solid state storage like a tapeless camcorder) even streaming
media. The term includes methods of video
production and post-production.
It is the equivalent of cinematography, but with images recorded on
electronic media instead of film stock.
The word combines "video" from Latin, meaning "I see"
or "I apprehend", with the Greek terminal ending
"graphy", meaning "to write". Its contemporary sense is
rooted in an article titled "Videography" What Does It All Mean? (American
Cinematographer, October 1972).[1]
The advent of digital imaging in the late 20th century
began to blur the distinction between videography and cinematography.
The arrival of computers and the Internet
created a global environment where videography covered many more fields than
just shooting video with a camera, including digital animation (such as Flash),
gaming,
web
streaming, video blogging, still slideshows,
remote sensing, spatial imaging, medical imaging, security
camera imaging, and in general the production of most bitmap-
and vector-based assets. As the field progresses
videographers may produce their assets entirely on a computer without ever
involving an imaging device, using software-driven solutions. Moreover, the
very concept of sociability and privacy are being reformed by the
proliferation of cell-phone and surveillance video cameras, which are spreading
at an exceptional rate globally.
A videographer
may be the actual camera operator or they may be the person in
charge of the visual design of a production (the latter being the equivalent
of a cinematographer).
PASCAL CONCEPTS 2014. |
