Hi there! It’s Ti again. First of all, I want to say sorry to my dear blog which I have abandoned for quite a while. Secondly, I want to ask where are you, my dear Joel? The glider thing is coming you know and yet we haven’t even bothered preparing things *sobbing*.
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As you know (I’m referring to out dear tutor – ms Ng, yeah) , my second target which was set in my ICA 1 is all about Photography. So I’m here (again) to blog about how photography actually came to life, how it began and how it changed the world of art.
The informations posted below are collected from various websites ( I’m exaggerating a bit since there are only 2 of them ). I’m not so good at history so actually all of them are typically copied and pasted. But I do read all of them, yeah! So excuse me for the history, ms Ng! I hope the next post about Photography skills and all that I can give my own comments and opinions!
And yeah, ms Ng and folks, do you know that Ti is actually a not-so-bad photographer too? Do visit my flickr for pictures, they were all taken by me! Yeah! Here is the url to my flickr, duhhh, I don’t know how to link in wordpress blog! So I hope you don’t mind copying and pasting this url into ur web browser! Here you go, people!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiphotography/
Cheers!
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Beginning of Photography
[ Well, I'm a bit curious how to take picture with this "camera" ] =)
First, the name. We owe the name “Photography” to Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
Before mentioning the stages that led to the development of photography, there is one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man called de la Roche (1729- 1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky substance. This surface, so the tale goes, would not only provide a mirror image on the sticky canvas, but would remain on it. After it had been dried in the dark the image would remain permanent. The author would not have known how prophetic this tale would be, only a few decades after his death.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible. It is somewhat surprising that photography was not invented earlier than the 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography came into being.
The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence for at least four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated.
The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light.
The first successful picture was produced in June/July 1827 by Niépce, using material that hardened on exposure to light. This picture required an exposure of eight hours.
On 4 January 1829 Niépce agreed to go into partnership with Louis Daguerre . Niépce died only four years later, but Daguerre continued to experiment. Soon he had discovered a way of developing photographic plates, a process which greatly reduced the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. He also discovered that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt.
Following a report on this invention by Paul Delaroche , a leading scholar of the day, the French government bought the rights to it in July 1839. Details of the process were made public on 19 August 1839, and Daguerre named it the Daguerreotype.
The announcement that the Daguerreotype “requires no knowledge of drawing….” and that “anyone may succeed…. and perform as well as the author of the invention” was greeted with enormous interest, and “Daguerreomania” became a craze overnight. An interesting account of these days is given by a writer called Gaudin , who was present the day that the announcement was made.
In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer , who introduced the Collodion process. This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in photography.
The next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin (which had been discovered only a few years before) instead of glass as a basis for the photographic plate. This led to the development of the dry plate process. Dry plates could be developed much more quickly than with any previous technique. Initially it was very insensitive compared with existing processes, but it was refined to the extent that the idea of factory-made photographic material was now becoming possible.
The introduction of the dry-plate process marked a turning point. No longer did one need the cumbersome wet-plates, no longer was a darkroom tent needed. One was very near the day that pictures could be taken without the photographer needing any specialised knowledge.
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Oh My God – that’s all I can think of now. It has taken me 2 hours to digest the whole thing and select only the main points to put up here. I guess some of our folks here will be too lazy to read, am I right? Because even the main points seem to take centuries to read and digest … *Sobbing* …
=)
Next entry coming up soon.
Next entry’s title: Development of digital photography.
!!! See ya!!
