Photography Basics

Lesson 1: History of Photography

The Evolution of Photography - Part II

Welcome back as we skate through more of history….

Did you notice anything about the 19th century of photography? Any mention of color film? Nope because daguerreotypes, calotypes, wet plates, and the earliest of roll film was truly “writing with light” that entered the camera. Everything was seen in shades of gray based on how much light was allowed to enter the camera.

Bring on the color!

In 1907, the first commercially successful color film was an additive process. Two French brothers, Antoine and Louis Lumiere, made public their Autochrome process. This was a glass plate covered in one layer with tiny bits of potato starch dyed orange, green, and violet. Then a light-sensitive emulsion was added. Light would hit the emulsion after passing through the colored starch. The emulsion behind each grain was exposed only by the light from the scene that was the same color as that grain. The result after the development was a full-color transparency. (There’s a great photo of this on page 373 in the seventh edition of “Photography.”)

In 1934, The Fuji Photo Film Company was founded to take over the proposed motion picture film manufacturing of the Dainippon Celluloid Company. The factory was located approximately 31 miles west of Tokyo, at the foot of the mountains leading to Mount Fuji.

The original intent of setting this factory up was to create a Japanese manufacturer of black and white motion picture film, as all products had been imported until this time. By 1939, black and white negatives for still cameras had been added to the company’s range of products.

In 1935, Kodachrome was born. Kodachrome is a subtractive process, and this is what made color photography practical. The process was perfected by Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, both musicians and amateur photographic researchers who joined their knowledge with Eastman Kodak research scientists. Kodachrome was a single sheet of film coated with 3 layers of emulsion, each sensitive to one of the primary colors. A single exposure produces a color image. (Another great photo to show the subtractive process is on the same page, same edition, same book, listed above.)

Also in 1935, Agfa introduced its own color film to the market, which was the world's first single film/single exposure/single developing process. In 1964, the largest European photographic company was created by the merger of Agfa and Gevaert (a Belgian photographer named Lieven Gevaert started producing high-quality photographic products, forming his own company, L. Gevaert & Cie.).

From this point onward, photography was in the hands of the general public. What came about as a result were heated debates and separate schools of thought. Photography was debated, “Is it an art form?” Some said yes, if it was not posed or manipulated. Others said, “No way! Anyone can take a snapshot.”

Straight photography dominated as an art form from the 1930 to the 1950s and is best shown by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, and Imogen Cummingham. Each believed in seeing something, capturing it, and not cropping any of the final image.

In 1944, Edward Land's daughter asked why she had to wait to see the picture he had just taken of her. Being the inventor of polarized glass and the owner of the Polaroid Corporation, he conceives the idea of the one-step photographic system that popularized Polaroid with the general public.

During the 1960s, an increasing number of colleges and art schools in the United States offered photography courses within their art departments. However, the first photography degree in the world was given by University of Westminster in London in 1841.

Throughout the 1970's, camera color negative speed remained low. It was a great improvement on the early days but still insufficient when low light level filming was required. All film companies concentrated on increasing film speed and in the 1980's high speed negative film came into the foray.

With the close of the 1980s came a whole new product for photography. One of the first digital cameras was the Sony ProMavica MVC-5000, appearing in 1989. The word "MAVICA" stands for Magnetic Video Camera. The camera recorded images as magnetic impulses on a compact 2-inch still-video floppy disk. The images were captured on the disk by using two CCD (charge-coupled device) chips. One chip stored luminance information and the other separately recorded the chrominance information. This camera provided a 720,000-pixel image.

In 1990, the Dycam Model 1 was the world’s first completely digital consumer camera. It had a fixed-focus 8 mm lens and stored 32 compressed images on internal 1MB RAM. It had 1/3-inch, 376 x 240 pixel CCD at 256 gray levels. The formats were TIFF or PICT 2.

In 1994, the first mass-market color digital camera was offered. The APPLE QUICK TAKE 100 had a 640 x 480 pixel CCD and up to eight images could be stored in internal memory. The lens was a fixed-focus 50mm, and this even had a built in flash.

Improvements to digital cameras keep occurring. In the last 10 years, they’ve gotten smaller, faster, and we’ve even got them embedded in cellular phones. What I want to know is this: With all the development that’s happened in the history of photography (100+ years), what’s next? What do you foresee in the future of photography?

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