The Camera Obscura was the forerunner to the modern day camera, it was used to form images on darkened walls using a pinhole, more of a projector than a form of producing photographs and used as an aid by many artists(Pic.1).

Pic.1

Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000AD, invented the first pinhole camera, also called the Camera Obscura  and was able to explain why the images were upside down.

The principle behind the device is probably the most complicated thing about it. A camera Obscura receives images just like the human eye—through a small opening and upside down. Light from outside enters the hole at an angle, the rays reflected from tops of objects, like trees, coursing downward, and those from the lower plane, say flowers, travelling upward, the rays crossing inside the dark space and forming an inverted image the brain automatically rights the eye’s image; in a regular camera a mirror flips the image (Pic.2).

 Pic.2

A scientist called Professor J. Schulze (in 1727) accidentally created the first photosensitive compound when he mixed chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask, he noticed darkening on the side of flask exposed to sunlight (Pic.3).

Pic.3

The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (Pic.4).

Pic.4

His photographs were produced on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea, which he then dissolved in white petroleum. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a positive image with light regions of hardened bitumen and dark regions of bare pewter. Niépce then began experimenting with silver compounds based on Professor Schulze’s findings.

Together with Louis Daguerre, Niépce refined the existing silver process. Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process. He discovered that exposing the silver  to iodine vapour before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form an image which could be fixed by bathing the plate in a salt bath. On January 7, 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype, and displayed the first plate (Pic.5).

Pic.5

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, Spring 1838, by Daguerre (includes the earliest reliably dated photograph of a person). The image shows a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least ten minutes the moving traffic cannot be seen. However, two men at lower left, one apparently having his boots polished and the other the bootblack, remained motionless enough to be distinctly visible (Pic.6).

Pic.6

“Photography” is derived from the Greek words: photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”). The word was originally atributed to the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839 however Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, had used the word photography first. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.

In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer, a London sculptor improved the photographic resolution by using nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol, developing Wet Plate Collodion (Pic.7) photography which was much cheaper than the daguerreotypes.

Pic.7

In 1861 a colour photography system was developed by Scottish Physicist James Clerk Maxwell when he used red, green and blue filters (Pic.8)

Pic.8

In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman’s Kodak camera (Pic.9) went on the market with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest”. Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.

Pic.9

By 1924 the first high quality 35mm camera was being produced commercially by Leitz and was known as the Leica (Pic.10).  Leica are still producing cameras today.  Fuji produced film from 1934 but it was Kodak who developed the first color multilayer film in 1936.

Pic.10

Carl Zeiss helped found Contax, a German based firm, who can probably be attributed with producing the first commercial SLR Camera (Pic.11) and he is closely associated with some of the finest lenses today.

Pic.11

The first digital cameras for the consumer-level market that worked with a home computer via a serial cable were the Apple Quick Take 100 (Pic.12) camera (February 1994), the Kodak DC40 camera (March 1995), the Casio QV-11 (late 1995), and Sony’s Cyber-Shot Digital Still Camera (1996).

Pic.12

However, Kodak entered into an aggressive co-marketing campaign to promote the DC40 and to help introduce the idea of digital photography to the public.

Today camera science is advancing rapidly, the latest camera’s offering vastly improved speeds, resolution and even HD video recording, one can only imagine at what the future holds for the photographer.

If you look at image 1, you can see a row of f/numbers on the top of the cart.  They are f/1.0, f/1.4, f/2.0, f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6, f/8.0, f/11, f/16, f/22.  These f/numbers represent the aperture size or aperture opening.  The bigger f/number gives the smaller aperture opening.  Thus from this sequence of numbers f/1.0 gives biggest aperture size and f/22 gives the smallest aperture.

On the left side of the chart there is a column of numbers that represent shutter speeds.  It tells how long the light will go through the aperture.  They are 1 sec, 1/2 sec, 1/4 sec, 1/8 sec, 1/15 sec, 1/30 sec, 1/60 sec, 1/125 sec, 1/250 sec, 1/500 sec. Although the numbers are getting bigger from top to bottom, in fact the time is getting shorter.  Thus the 1/8 sec is longer than 1/15 sec, but 1/250 is shorter than 1/125 sec.

Every step in the chart from left to right and from top to bottom is called one stop.  It is also applicable for every step from right to left and from bottom to top.  For example, if you want to set up f/numbers from f/2.0 to f/2.8, you have to move one stop, but if you want to set up f/number from f/4.0 to f/8.0 you have to do two stops.  You have to keep the same approach to the shutter speed column.  Increasing time in one stop you have to change your shutter speed from 1/8 sec to 1/4 sec, but decreasing the shutter speed in one stop you have to move from 1/125 sec to 1/250 sec and so on.  The movement from 1/8 sec shutter speed to 1/125 sec give you 4 stops.

You can ask, why do I need this?  OK.  Have a look at an example from real life situation. I was walking with my friend on countryside and doing her portraits.  For portraiture is better to use a wide opening aperture.  It gives a focus on the subject, but not on the background.  For this reason I used the f/2.8 number and the shutter speed 1/125 sec.  Then I decided to take photos of landscapes that surrounded us.  For landscapes is better to use small aperture size such as f/5.6, f/8.0, f/11, f/16 and f/22.  I chose the f/5.6.  It meant I made 2 stops from f/2.8 to f/5.6 towards right side of the chart.  To keep the same amount of exposure I have to move from 1/125 sec to 1/30 sec shutter speed.  By another word I have to move also 2 stops towards the top of the shutter speed column.

If you look at the chart you can see that a combination f/2.8 and shutter speed 1/125 sec gives a cell with number 10.  If you do two stops on the right and towards the top of the chart, you will get the number 10 again.

Thus the chart can be very useful, if you do not have time to figure out how to find the same exposure.  Only you have to do is look at the chart and find the same number that a previous setting gave you.  In my case it was the number 10.

Useful Links:

Shutter and Aperture

Exposure

To tell a story you can use a lot of tricks.

Make your subject looking outside the field of view and focus on something unseen.  It will intrigue a viewer.

For group portrait make your subjects looking within the frame.  They could look at each other or at the same direction.

Give your subject room to look into.  For this you have to put the face of your subject on the right or on the left edge of the frame and let him/her look across the image.

Experiment with lighting.  You can get very powerful and dramatic portrait using directed light from only one side of the subject.

Take your picture candidly, when the subject does not aware this and acting naturally.

Position your camera a little lower than eye line of the subject.  It is a good use for direct eye contact.

Use the rule of composition for your portraits.  Position the subject in focal points of the rule of thirds.

Obscure part of your subject.  Give a chance for viewer’s imagination to work.

Take a series of shorts using the continue shooting mode of a camera.  It is a very handy tool for taking children photos.

Some object in hands of your subject can contribute in telling a story.  For example, a camera is in hands of a photographer.

Useful Links:

The Portrait Photographer http://portrait-photographer.blogspot.com/2009/03/composition.html

The Wonder of Light  http://www.thewonderoflight.com/articles/?page_id=102

Narrative Portraiture