Module 10: The OG camera
Search for a piece of technology that is ubiquitous and developed before your birth date. The item you are covering should not be digital. Research how it was discovered and developed for commercial production. If possible, expose why it was (or was not) successful.
What is a Camera Obscura?
In this blog post we are looking at the worldâs first recorded camera! (woo!).Â
âCamera obscura (from Latin "camera": (vaulted) chamber or room, and "obscura": darkened, plural: camerae obscurae), also referred to as pinhole image, is the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene at the other side of a screen (or for instance a wall) is projected through a small hole in that screen as a reversed and inverted image (left to right and upside down) on a surface opposite to the opening. The surroundings of the projected image have to be relatively dark for the image to be clear, so many historical camera obscura experiments were performed in dark rooms.â
(figure 1)
History:
(figure 2)
It was first mentioned in 400 BC by Mo-ti as he is the first known mention of the basic concept of a pinhole camera. Fast forward to 1827! Joseph Nicephore Niepce captured an image using a pinhole camera to produce the first photographic image (see figure 2). Soon people were improving the process, Â which created the the age of modern photography!
Itâs earlier uses were to view the solar eclipse and to draw accurate portraits of people using sedan chairs.
Joseph NicĂŠphore NiĂŠpce, View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826 was the first photograph to ever be taken! He was experimenting with different photo chemicals to concoct the perfect mixture to create a permanent photograph. He took this image in his home and had a very long exposure (explains why there is no human or animal presence).Â
After itâs innovation and new found use as a camera that creates permanent photographs it wasnât long before other photographers crafted their own mixtures to create their own style photographs (heliographs vs. daguerreotypes calotype, wet-collodion, dry plates etc).
It wasnât until 1884-1889 photography became accessible to amateurs  when inventor George Eastman began producing film on rolls. âIn 1888, Eastman used  film as the primary selling point of his first Kodak camera, a small, 100-exposure model that customers could use and then send back to the manufacturer to have their photos developed. Eastmanâs camera was remarkably easy to useâhe marketed it to Victorian shutterbugs under the slogan âYou press the button, we do the restââbut its coated paper film produced fairly low quality photos. Film would improve by leaps and bounds with the introduction of celluloid a year later, and remained the standard means of photography for nearly a century until the advent of digital cameras.â
Citations:
http://cool.conservation-us.org/byorg/abbey/an/an26/an26-3/an26-307.html
http://www.obscurajournal.com/history.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura