Topics and People of Photography

        Camera Obscura: This was one of the inventions that later led to photography. It is a box or room with a hole on one side that lets light in which then strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. This was used and studied for many years by the Chinese and eventually lead to the invention of the pinhole camera. 

        Johann Heinrich Schulze: In 1727, photography was still being experimented with and chemicals were being tested to see which ones were working the best with prints. It was known that certain chemicals darken when exposed to the sun, it was not clear whether it was the action of light or heat which had this effect. Schulze discovered silver salts by leaving a bottle filled with chalk, silver and nitric-acid by a window, which because of the sunlight turned the chemicals on the exposed side a darker colour. Schulze then attached paper stencils to the outside of another glass enabling the covered areas to remain white and the uncovered areas to darken. 

        Thomas Wedgwood: Wedgwood was the first man to think of and develop a method to copy visible images chemically to permanent media. His father was a potter so he got the idea to use ceramic pots coated with silver nitrate as well as treated paper and white leather as media of print. This proved to not be entirely successful so he later went back and revised his methods. His final result was a method of chemically staining an object's silhouette to paper by coating the paper with silver nitrate and exposing the paper, with the object on top, to natural light, then preserving it in a dark room. 

        Nicephore Niepce: Niepce was always experimenting with things so when lithography came about, he began testing out it's abilities. Working with a camera obscura, he dissolved bitumen in lavender oil and coated the sheet of pewter with this light capturing mixture. He then placed the sheet inside a camera obscura to capture the picture, and eight hours later took it out and washed it with lavender oil to get rid of the unexposed bitumen. Thus the first photograph! 

       Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre: Partnering with Niepce was a man by the name of Daguerre. Along with Niepce, they redefined the process of making photographs. Daguerre first exposed silver-coated copper plates to iodine and then he exposed them to light for several minutes, coated the plate with mercury vapor heated to 75° Celsius and finally fixing the image in salt water. The result was a plate with a mirror image of the scene. These ideas led to the famous Daguerreotype term.

       William Henry Fox Talbot: Talbot is famous inventing the calotype process. This process was a refinement of this process where the negative paper direct image was printed onto a sensitised sheet placed underneath. The negative meant that the print could be reproduced as many times as was required.

        Hill and Adamson: Around 1840, two men by the names of David Hill and Robert Adamson, produced the first body of photography work. They made a great team with Hill composing each photograph and Adamson operating the camera and working with the chemicals. They used Talbot's calotype method and over the course of four years they produced nearly 3,000 images. These photographs made up a body of work that still ranks among the highest achievements of photographic portraiture.

David Hill

Robert Adamson

        Julia Margaret Cameron: Although she began her photography career late, at the age of 48, Cameron is very famously known for photographing many influentials figures during that time. This includes: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. These portraits she did were known for being cropped closely around the subjects face and for having a slight blur about them due to a long exposure time. 

        Felix Nadar: Nadar was a journalist, writer and artist, but most commonly known for being a daredevil with the camera. He was the first photographer in France to take pictures underground or in dark places using artificial light. He was also the first photographer to take ariel pictures using a hot air ballon and flying high above the streets of Paris with his camera. 

Rotating Self-Portrait 

        Scott Archer: Archer began his career making sculptures, mainly of people, which then lead to his interest in photography to help aid him with his portrait sculptures. Learning the calotype process, he experimented with collodion trying to reduce the amount of texture and unevenness inherent in the paper. He devoted all his time on photography now, which paid off in 1849, when he made the discovery of coating a glass plate with iodized collodion and exposing it while still wet, a process that finally worked. 

Dr. Richard Maddox: Dr Richard Maddox discovered a method of using gelatin instead of glass as the plate material for the light-sensitive solution. This discovery led to the invention of dry plate photography, a less cumbersome process that did not require the photographer to use a darkroom tent for immediate plate development as had been required by wet plate processes.

George Eastman: In 1884, Eastman patented the first film in roll form to prove practicable; in 1888 he perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film. In 1892, he established the Eastman Kodak Company, in Rochester, New York, one of the first firms to mass-produce standardized photography equipment. This company also manufactured the flexible transparent film, devised by Eastman in 1889, which proved vital to the subsequent development of the motion picture industry.