A History of Photography

History of Photography

These days, photography is something that can be done by almost everyone, because cameras are pretty much everywhere. This is why people, both amateurs and professionals, can do everything from simple point and shoot photography, all the way to specialty skills like product, architectural, and commercial photography. But before this was possible, photography had to undergo over 200 years of development, using the ideas and experiments done by the ancient minds from over thousands of years ago.

The basic concepts used in photography, are traced back all the way to the ancient minds of civilizations past many thousands of years ago. Ancient philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, like Mo Ti from China, and Aristotle from Greece, were said to have tinkered with what is known as a pinhole camera. This trend during the ancient times would be shared by the other great civilizations of the era, which had their own scientists playing around with their own camera-like devices, which they used in experiments and scientific studies.

But all of the examples above simply dabbled with the basic principles of photography, because it wouldn’t be until 1826, that the first actual and permanent photograph would be produced. It was an image made by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, whose photographs were made on a combination of polished pewter plate, and bitumen of Judea, which hardens when exposed to light. Once the bitumen hardens on the metal plate, it leaves a negative image which can then be used to produce a print, by coating it with ink and pressing on paper.

This heralded the development of many other processes over the years, like in 1840, Fox Talbot made the next big step, when he invented the calotype process that used paper sheets coated with silver chloride. This paper would create an intermediate negative image, which in turn could then be used to create positive prints. This kind of paper, and the process used in creating prints, was one of the precursors to the modern chemical film, and modern film development.

But it wasn’t just film and camera technologies that were being advanced during that time, because even the methods of taking photos were taking huge strides. In 1849, a Russian photographer named Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky, a man who created a bellows camera design that improved the way photographers would focus, began using artificial light in studios, to take photos of subjects. It was a far cry from the old ways of using simple or natural light, and have earned him numerous awards during his time, in addition to beginning the trend of studio photography.

All of these past milestones laid the groundwork for further development, which would lead to us enjoying the benefits of modern cameras today. Digital photography is now the norm in many areas, opening the doors to further developments in photography in the future. This would then attract even more people to photography, both as a hobby and as a career.

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