Photography - Its History and the Earliest Techniques

The word 'photography' is of Greek origin coming from the combination of 'photos' meaning 'light' and 'graphein' which is 'to draw'. It pertained to the use of light or any related radiation to record images on a sensitive material and was first used in 1839 by Sir John F W Herschel, a scientist.

The history of the camera, to speak of it as a piece of equipment involved in taking photographs, goes beyond the introduction or the subject of photography. When we delve into how the camera evolved from its very early days to a highly sophisticated and complex electronic gadget, there are parallels to be drawn in the evolution of cameras and photographic technology beginning with the 'camera obscura' and running through others such as daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film and finally the digital camera.

'Camera Obscura' or the Pinhole Camera

The origin of the camera began with the 'camera obscura' which can be dated to the ancient Chinese and Greeks where a pinhole or lens projected an upside down image of a picture or scenery outside on to a viewing surface. One of the greatest authorities on Optics around 1000 AD, Ibn Al-Haytham is credited with making the first pinhole camera; he was able to explain why the images were upside down on the reflected surface like the vision concept of the human eye. However, even before this, the first reference to such optic laws was noted in 330 BC by the Greek scholar and historian, Aristotle; his question and theory that the sun when captured through a square hole produced a circular image.

In 1545, instrument maker and mathematician of Leuven University, Belgium, Reiners Gemma Frisius published a diagram of the pinhole method he had used the previous year to watch a solar eclipse. In 1558, a turnaround concept was brought in by Giovanni Batista Della Porta who recommended the use of this concept as an aid for drawing.

The progression of the photographic process had to evolve in a manner that allowed the preservation of images that were produced by these cameras; the only known process then was to manually trace the pictures by hand. It's hard to imagine that the first cameras were so large that they could house a couple of people inside them. The evolution was almost complete when in 1685 the transition to a portable camera from a room-sized one was visualized as a path breaking concept by Johann Zahn. But it would be another century and a half before the application of such a concept could be taken up in a commercial manner.

When was the first photograph taken?

There is no clear answer to this question. Some of the facts we know are these.

The first camera design was patented in 1840 by Alexander Wolcott. However, there is not enough evidence to show if Wolcott's camera was used to capture images and if any of them are still in existence.

What we can count as the earliest evidence is a photographic image captured by Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1816, using a pinhole camera. Before Niepce stumbled on his defining moment of creating the earliest prototypes for modern photography techniques, people used the pinhole camera or the camera obscura for drawing and viewing purposes not for taking photographs. Niepce's 'heliographs' or sun-prints as they were referred to, let the light of the sun draw or 'imprint' the picture.

Niepce used a very small camera that he had made and projected an image on to a paper coated with silver chloride. Portions of the silver chloride darkened when exposed to light leaving an image but at that time Niepce did not know how the remove the remaining silver chloride that was unaffected; as a result, the image or photograph was not a permanent one, eventually the entire silver chloride became darkened due to over-exposure to light.

A few years later, Niepce used a slightly different method. With the help of a sliding box camera that was made by the French opticians Charles and Vincent Chevalier and a metal plate thinly coated with bitumen on which the images were exposed. Where the reflection of light was brightest on the images, the bitumen slowly hardened leaving a clear imprint; the unhardened portions were then dissolved to preserve the image. It is believed that one of these earliest imprint photographs is still in existence.

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