Chapter One
Reading Log #1
“ Seizing the Light” 3rd Edition, by Robert Hirsch
I think one of the reasons why I decided on taking this class during my Senior year at UCF, is because I never really paid much attention to this form of art. My father and my youngest sister were always the camera gurus and both shared and undying love for photography. Me? I always felt like I didn’t have an “eye” for photography. It made me so frustrated to watch my dad go out to his backyard and snap a few shots of some birds and other wild life, as I stood in behind the sliding glass door. When he returned back inside our home, he’d upload his photos, and to my surprise, he had produced the most beautiful photos of the backyard ducklings and doves. My sister, Valerie, always had her own particular and artistic way of displaying her props in her photos. She was very much aware of the lighting, positioning of her camera, and details that I may have overlooked myself. It was astonishing, yet very frustrating.
I began to practice some more once I entered college. I took a class on traditional photography and then digital. But I still don’t quite “get it.” As I’m reading the first chapter of this assigned textbook, I realize that I never actually read about the first camera obscura, or the beginnings of photography in our history. Who would have thought that a darkened box with a convex lens or aperture for projecting the image of an external object onto a screen inside would pave the way for something that is so important to the daily logs of our lives? It is historically important in the development of photography and I’m so ignorant of this piece of our history.
Here are a few names that I felt are important to remember:
- Mo Ti; a Chinese philosopher who discovered that light reflecting from an illuminated object and passing through a pinhole into a darkened area would created an exact image of that object, offering a prototype of the pinhole camera.
- Leonardo da Vinci; In 1490, he wrote the earliest description of the camera obscura, a device that was designed to reproduce linear perspective.
- Albrecht Durer; A German artist who, before Leonardo, was one of the first artists to ingeniously adapt these camera-based principles of perspective and proportion to his drawings, and he called this, “ miracles of paintings.”
- William Henry Fox Talbot; A wealthy Englishman, scientist, and scholar, who invented the salted paper print, which is a printing-out process that allowed him to make cameraless images. Most of these images were plants, but also included engravings and lace. He also used “photogenic drawing” as a term used to describe the early salted paper process.
- Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre; he took highly polished silver plates and sensitized them in the dark with heated iodine crystal vapors, and immediately placing them in the camera and making one-hour exposures in bright sunlight. This created a very detailed negative image. Daguerre later made a breakthrough by developing the plates after the exposure with heated mercury vapor.
- Sir Henry Herschel; In 1819, he discovered that hyposulphite of soda would dissolve silver salts. He started his own research into the light-sensitive properties of silver halides and other various chemicals. Herschel was the one who provide the missing link to many of the pioneers’ processes of how to make permanent images. He shaped the founding concepts of photography and its terminology. He even introduced the terms, “negative” and “positive” and “emulsion.”
These pioneers of photography all worked towards the founding and discovery of something so many of us take for granted. I never would have thought about Sir Henry Herschel as I took a photo of my Sunday morning breakfast or my cat, Amberly, as she snuggled up to me on the couch. So why should I care so much about these pioneers and their work? What impact does their findings have on my daily routine? Does anyone ever think about how we came to what we know today? I feel as though no one really truly thinks about the roots of many things that we know and use today and I think this is why I chose to take this class. To better understand these discoveries and our history.
