The first photo in history. History of artistic photography. Shutter and exposure
In what year was the first selfie taken, what was the reason for the creation of the first fake photo and how photojournalism began.
For almost 200 years of its existence, photography has come a long and curious way. For example, 1839 is considered the official year of her birth, but the first photograph (surviving to this day) was taken earlier - in 1826 or 1827. The first digital camera was invented in 1975, and the first digital photography made in 1957.
In our selection - these and 18 other "first" shots in amazing story photography.
1. First photo
The first photograph taken by a camera dates from 1826 (more rarely, 1827). The image, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and known as "View from the Window at Le Gras", was created using a camera obscura on a plate coated with a thin layer of bitumen. The bitumen on different parts of the plate solidified depending on the amount of light that hit it, then the unexposed bitumen was washed off. Niépce called this technology heliography - "solar writing".
2. The first photograph of a person
The first photograph of a person was taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838. Daguerre filmed a window view of a busy Parisian street, the Boulevard du Temple; the shutter speed was almost 10 minutes, which made it impossible to capture the passers-by in the photo - they simply did not stay in one place long enough to stay in the picture. However, in the lower left corner, a man is seen standing and having his shoes polished. Later, the analysis of the picture made it possible to establish that other people were also captured on it - can you find them?
3. First selfie
Long before the selfie became fashionable, American photographer Robert Cornelius took the first self-portrait. This was in 1839. To capture himself, Cornelius had to pose for more than a minute.
4. The first photo of the moon
The first photograph of a moon was taken on March 26, 1840 by John Draper. This daguerreotype was taken from an observatory at New York University. Judging by the state of the picture, he got a lot for more than a century and a half since the shooting.
5. The first fake photo
The first fake photo was taken by Hippolyte Bayard in 1840. Bayard and Louis Daguerre claimed the title of "Father of Photography". According to some reports, Bayard invented his process for taking photographs before Daguerre created the daguerreotype. However, the announcement of his invention was delayed, and the glory of the discoverer went to Daguerre. As a protest, Bayard took this staged self-portrait, accompanied by a signature about his suicide due to the fact that his work was not appreciated.
6. The first photo of the president
The first American president to be photographed was John Quincy Adams, the sixth head of the United States. However, this daguerreotype was made in 1843, and Adams left his post in 1829. The first president photographed during his presidency was James Polk. His photo was taken in 1849.
7. The first photo of the sun
The first photograph of the sun was taken by French physicists Louis Fizeau and Léon Foucault on April 2, 1845, using the daguerreotype process (don't tell Bayard!) and a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second. On closer inspection, sunspots can be seen.
8. First news photo
The name of the first photojournalist has not been preserved in history, but his work is. The daguerreotype, made in 1847, captures the arrest of a man in France.
9. First aerial photography
The first bird's-eye photo was taken in 1860. Of course, it was filmed not from a drone, but from a balloon. The photographer, James Wallace Black, captioned his image "Boston as seen by an eagle and a wild goose."
10. First color photograph
The first color photograph was taken by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, at a lecture at the Royal Institution, as proof of his theory of filming in color. Actually, another person clicked the shutter - the photographer Thomas Sutton, the inventor of the first SLR camera, but the authorship is attributed to Maxwell, since he developed the process of obtaining a color image.
11. First color landscape photograph
The first landscape photograph in color was taken in 1877. The photographer, Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron, was the pioneer of color photography and the originator of the color printing process that was used for this image. It captures the landscape of the south of France, as the name of the picture says - “Landscape of the south of France”.
12. The first photo of lightning
Lightning is an extremely interesting subject to shoot. The first photographer to capture this phenomenon was William Jennings. The picture was taken in 1882.
13. The first photo of a tornado
This tornado was captured in 1884 by farmer and amateur photographer A.A. Adams from Kansas. The photo was taken with a box camera, from a distance of 22 kilometers from the tornado.
14. The first photo of the plane crash
Disasters are not the most pleasant subjects to photograph. But studying such cases can help find and correct mistakes in order to prevent tragedies in the future. This 1908 photo shows the death of aviator Thomas Selfridge. His aircraft was an experimental development of the aircraft manufacturer Aerial Experiment Association. Orville Wright was on the plane with Selfridge, but he survived the crash.
15. The first photo from space
The first photograph from space was taken on October 24, 1946, from a V-2 No. 13 rocket. The black and white image captures the Earth from a height of more than 100 kilometers. The image was taken with a 35mm movie camera that took a photo every 1.5 seconds during the entire rocket takeoff.
16. First rocket launch from Cape Canaveral
The launch from Cape Canaveral was first captured in a photo in July 1950 - a NASA photographer filmed the launch of the Bumper 2 research two-stage rocket. The photo also shows a number of other photographers who filmed this event.
17. First digital photograph
The first digital photograph was taken in 1957, nearly 20 years before a Kodak engineer invented the first digital camera. A photograph is a digital scan of a frame originally taken on film. The picture shows the son of Russell Kirsch, the inventor of the digital scanner. Image resolution - 176 × 176: a square photo, quite suitable for Instagram.
18. The first photo of the far side of the moon
The first photo of the "dark" side of the Moon was received from the Soviet station "Luna-3", October 7, 1959. Based on the images sent by the interplanetary station, the first map of the back side of the satellite, not visible from Earth, was compiled.
19. The first photograph of the Earth from the Moon
The Earth was first photographed from the Moon on August 23, 1966. The photo was taken by the Lunar Orbiter, during the 16th revolution around the satellite.
20. The first photo from Mars
The first photo of Mars was taken by the Viking 1 spacecraft shortly after it landed on the surface of the red planet. The photograph is dated July 20, 1976; images from the Viking made it possible to study the surface of Mars and its structure.
This is far from full list the very “first” photographs in history – the first underwater photo, the first wedding photo, the first portrait of a woman, the first photomontage, and much more remained “behind the scenes”. Not every one of them captures a historical moment, but they are all historical moments in their own right.
Since ancient times, people have wanted to capture the beautiful moments of their lives, natural phenomena, to express a sense of beauty through a material form. This is how poets write poetry, composers compose music, and artists embody beauty on canvas. With the invention of the camera and the development of photography, this became more real. The history of the development of photography has many attempts, even before the creation of the first photograph, to reproduce the process of photographing, when mathematicians studying the optics of light refraction found out that the image turns over if it is passed into a dark room through a small hole.
In 1604, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered mathematical laws reflections of light in mirrors. These laws later laid the foundation for the theory of lenses, following which the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei invented the first telescope to observe celestial bodies. The principle of refraction of rays was established, but it was still possible to save the resulting images on prints.
In the 1820s, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce invented a way to store the resulting image in a camera obscura. In it, the incident light was treated with asphalt varnish (analogous to bitumen) on a glass surface. With the help of asphalt varnish, the image took shape and became visible. Thus, for the first time in history of photography and of all mankind, the picture was created not by an artist, but by falling rays of light in refraction.
In 1835, the English physicist William Talbot invented the print of a photograph - the negative, and with the help of Niepce's camera obscura, he was able to improve the quality of photographic images with it. After the advent of this innovation, it became possible to copy pictures. Talbot took his first photograph, which showed his own window with the window bars clearly visible. Later, he wrote a report in which he called artistic photography the world of beauty, so Talbot laid down one of the future principles of photographic printing in the history of photography.
In 1861, T. Setton, a photographer from England, invented the first camera in history with a single reflex lens. The principle of operation of this camera was as follows, a large box was fixed on a tripod with a lid impervious to light from above, but through which it was possible to observe. The lens caught focus on the glass, where the image was formed with the help of mirrors.
In 1889, the name of George Eastman Kodak appears in the history of photography, who patented the world's first film in the form of a roll, and later the Kodak camera, suitable specifically for this film. In the future, the name "Kodak" became the brand of a large company. The most interesting thing is that the name does not have a strong semantic load, it's quite simple that Eastman decided to come up with a word that begins and ends with the same letter.
In 1904, the Lumiere brothers released color photo plates under the brand name "Lumiere". These plates later became the founders of the future of color photography.
In 1923, the first camera was invented, which uses 35 mm film taken from the cinema. This made it possible to obtain small negatives and print large images of only the pictures of interest. After 2 years, Leica cameras went into mass production.
In 1935, Leica 2 cameras began to be equipped with a separate viewfinder, a powerful focusing system that combined two pictures into one. Subsequently, in the new Leica 3 cameras, it becomes possible to use the shutter speed control. For a very long time, Leica cameras have been powerful and indispensable tools in the art of photography in the world.
In 1935, Kodak launched Kodakchrom color film into mass production. But for a long time, when printing, they had to be sent for revision after development, where color components were already superimposed during development.
In 1942, Kodak launched Kodakcolor film, which became one of the most popular films for professional and amateur cameras for the next half century.
In 1963, a revolution in photo printing was made by the Polaroid cameras, which made it possible to print a photo instantly after taking a picture with one click. It only took a few minutes for the image outlines to appear on the blank print, and then a good quality full color photo to show through. For the next 30 years, the versatile Polaroid cameras would dominate the history of photography to give way to the era of digital photography.
In the 1970s cameras began to be equipped with a built-in exposure meter, autofocus, automatic shooting modes, amateur 35 mm cameras had a built-in flash. Later, by the 80s, cameras began to be equipped with LCD panels that showed the user the program settings and camera modes. The era of digital technology was just beginning.
In 1974, the first digital photograph of the starry sky was obtained using an electronic astronomical telescope.
In 1980, Sony introduced the Mavica digital video camera to the market. The captured video was stored on a flexible, rewritable floppy disk that could be erased many times for a new recording.
In 1988, Fujifilm officially launched the first Fuji DS1P digital camera, where photographs were stored digitally on electronic media. The camera had 16Mb of internal memory.
In 1991, Kodak released the Kodak DCS10 digital SLR camera, which has 1.3 mp resolution and a set of ready-made functions for professional digital shooting.
In 1994, Canon introduced optical image stabilization to some of its cameras.
In 1995, Kodak, following Canon, ceased production of its branded film cameras, which have been popular for the last half century.
2000s Rapidly developing on the basis of digital technologies, Sony corporations, Samsung absorb most of the digital camera market. New amateur digital cameras quickly overcame the 3-megapixel technological frontier and easily compete with professional photographic equipment in size from 7 to 12 megapixels in terms of matrix size. In spite of fast development technologies in digital technology, such as: face detection in the frame, skin tone correction, red-eye removal, 28x zoom, automatic shooting scenes and even triggering the camera at the moment of a smile in the frame, the average price in the digital camera market continues to fall, especially since in the amateur segment, cameras have begun to resist mobile phones with built-in digital zoom cameras. Demand for film cameras has plummeted and now there is another upward trend in the price of analog photography, which is becoming a rarity.
As usual, it is believed that photography was invented by one person. Of course it isn't. Photography was not invented by one person, but by a whole galaxy of enthusiastic people. The history of photography goes back to time immemorial, from the camera obscura...
And it was like this: the incredible turbulence of photographic life began in 1839, when Daguerre published his important message about the invention of photography. In the same 1839, Hippolyte Bayard demonstrated positive prints in Paris, and John Herschel read at the Royal Society (Academy of Sciences in England) his report on the method he invented for fixing photographs using soda hyposulfite, the very hyposulfite that is now used in every darkroom . And before that, for more than 100 years, photography made its way to the light ...
But long before these events, the first person to prove that light, and not heat makes silver salt dark, was Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687-1744), physicist, professor at the University of Gaul in Germany. In 1725, while trying to prepare a luminous substance, he accidentally (accidentally!) mixed chalk with nitric acid, which contained some dissolved silver. He noticed that when sunlight fell on a white mixture, it became dark, while the mixture, protected from sunlight, did not change at all. Then he conducted several experiments with letters and figures, which he cut out of paper and put on a bottle of prepared solution - photographic prints were obtained on silver-plated chalk. Professor Schulze published the data obtained in 1727, but he had no idea to try to make the images found in this way permanent. He shook the solution in the bottle, and the image disappeared. This experiment, however, gave rise to a whole series of observations, discoveries and inventions in chemistry, which, with the help of a camera obscura, led to the discovery of photography a little more than a century later. And for this he must be thanked.
And yet, where was the beginning of photography? Where is the starting point? The chemical prehistory of photography begins in ancient times. People have always known that human skin darkens from sunlight, opals and amethysts sparkle, the taste of beer deteriorates... The optical history of photography goes back about a thousand years. The very first camera obscura can be called "a room part of which is illuminated by the sun." The tenth-century Arab mathematician and scientist Alhazen of Basra, who wrote about the basic principles of optics and studied the behavior of light, noticed the natural phenomenon of the inverted image. He saw this upside-down image on the white walls of darkened rooms or tents set up on the sunny shores of the Persian Gulf - the image passed through a small round hole in the wall, in the open canopy of the tent or drapery.
The large camera obscura built in Kim by Athanasius Kircher in 1646 is shown without the top and side walls. It was a small mobile room, which was easily carried by the artist to the place where he wanted to paint. The artist climbed into this room through the hatch. On the engraving, he outlines, on the reverse side, an image on transparent paper, which hangs opposite one of the lenses.
Alkhazen used a camera obscura to observe solar eclipses, knowing that it was harmful to look at the sun with the naked eye. The inverted image of the camera obscura is explained simply: the light passes in straight lines through a small hole made in the center. Lines of light reflected from the base of the sunlit landscape enter the opening and are projected in a straight line towards the top of the wall of the darkened room. Similarly, lines of light reflected from the top of the landscape go to the base of the wall, and all the lines respectively pass through the center, forming an inverted image. In the early years of the fifteenth century, artists began to strive to reproduce light in their canvases.
A keen interest in optics in the sixteenth century laid the foundations scientific discoveries next century. In 1604, Kepler determined the physical and mathematical laws of mirror reflection. In 1609, Galileo invented the compound telescope. In 1611, Johannes Kepler developed a theory of lenses that became reliable scientific tools. Interest in optical phenomena swept all over Europe like a fever. Artists, as well as scientists, have been strongly influenced by these scientific findings. If artists showed scientists how to see the world, now scientists paid them for this service. The visual arts of the sixteenth century, especially in Venice and northern Italy, reflected a great interest in optical phenomena, and in the seventeenth century it became almost universal.
Jan Vermeer. Girl in a red hat. About 1660. Tree. Butter.
Architects, scene painters, sculptors have fallen prey to the love of illusion. As usual, they fell first! The imagination of the artists' vision was boundless. Some of the Dutch—Karel Fabricius, Jan Vermeer, Samuel van Hoogstraten—and the Spaniard Velázquez went even further than the perceived possibilities of the naked eye and drew phenomena that could only be seen with the help of a mirror or lenses. Vermeer's painting Girl in a Red Hat, for example, appears to us as if it were taken by a camera, which makes "random circles" around brightly lit places, when not every beam in the light stream is clearly focused. For the artists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, the camera obscura became of great practical use, and the size of the camera kept getting smaller.
It became possible to use the camera obscura in nature, and closed chairs and awnings were modified for this purpose in the seventeenth century. In 1620, Kepler, the great astronomer and optical physicist, pitched a dark tent in a field, placed a lens in the slit of the tent, and observed the image that appeared on white paper attached to the opposite side of the tent, opposite the lens.
The camera obscura soon became two feet long and less than a foot high (1 foot = 30.8 cm), with a lens on one side and a mirror at the base of the other. The reflex camera obscura was created by Johann Zahn in 1685. His box had the advantage that the mirror was placed inside at a 45 degree angle to the lens and the image was reflected at the top of the box. Here he placed frosted glass covered with tracing paper, and could easily trace the image. Tsang also invented an even smaller reflex camera obscura with a built-in lens. It was very reminiscent of the cameras used by Niépce a hundred and fifty years later. The increased number of middle-class people in the eighteenth century created a demand for moderately priced portraits. Previously, portraits were only the privilege of the rich. The first response to this demand was the creation of "silhouette", a method in which the contours or shadows projected onto paper were simply outlined, and then this paper was cut and pasted. The 'face outline' invented by Gilles-Louis Chrétien in 1786 was basically the same as the 'silhouette', with the slight advantage that the outline was engraved on a copper plate. Several prints could be made from this plate.
Hand carved silhouettes of Charles Wage, two years old, and his mother. 1824
To the beginning e nineteenth century American artist Rembrandt Peel made similar silhouettes, which he called "profiles".
And finally it happened! Nicephore Niépce of France was the first person to successfully image using the sun. In 1827 he tried to present his paper to the Royal Society in London. But since Niépce kept his process a secret, refusing to describe it in a report, the Royal Society did not accept his proposal (the times were difficult, and such discoveries were kept secret, as nanotechnology is now kept secret). Nevertheless, several photographs were attached to the report, taken both on metal and on glass. In 1853, Robert Hunt, one of the earliest historians of photography, reported that some of these photographic plates were in the collection of the Royal (British) Museum. R. Hunt writes: “They prove that N. Niepce knows the method of creating images, with the help of which light, halftones and shadows are transmitted as naturally as it is observed in nature; he succeeded also in making his heliographs, which are not further exposed to the rays of the sun. Some of these specimens are very well engraved." We should not be surprised that these photographic plates looked like engravings, since Niepce actually invented photogravure, and those samples that R. Hunt saw were taken precisely for heliogravures, and not photographs taken with a camera obscura.
Personal, portable camera obscura, early 19th century.
As you can see, the path of photography to the light was thorny and difficult. In those distant times, chemistry and physics were studied very poorly, chemists were burned at the stake, accusing them of witchcraft. This was a serious reason for the long development not only of photography, but of science in general.
The first photograph in history was taken in 1826 by the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
Niépce used a camera obscura and… asphalt that hardens in places lit by the sun. To create a photograph, he covered a metal plate with a thin layer of bitumen and for 8 hours filmed the view from the window of the workshop where he worked.
The image turned out, of course, of poor quality, however, it was the first photograph in the history of mankind, in which it was possible to distinguish the outlines of real objects.
The very method of obtaining the image Zh.N. Niépce called heliography, which can roughly be translated as "drawing by the sun."
However, along with Niepce, Daguerre and Talbot are considered the inventors of photography. Why is that? The thing is that Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, also a Frenchman, collaborated with J.N. Niepce, working on the invention, but Niepce never managed to bring his offspring to mind - he died in 1833. Further development was carried out by Daguerre.
He used a more advanced technique - he no longer had bitumen, but silver, as a photosensitive element. After holding a plate covered with silver in the camera obscura for half an hour, then he transferred it to a dark room and held it over mercury vapor, after which he fixed the image with a solution of common salt. The first photograph of Daguerre - of very good quality - was a rather complex composition of paintings and sculptures. The method, which Daguerre discovered by 1837, he named after himself - daguerreotype, and in 1839 he made it public by presenting it to the French Academy of Sciences.
Around the same time, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot discovered a method for producing a negative image.
He obtained it in 1835 using paper impregnated with silver chloride. The pictures came out of very high quality for that time, although the process of photographing at first took longer than Daguerre's - up to an hour. The main difference of Talbot's invention was the possibility of copying pictures - it was possible to transfer a positive image (photo) from a negative by making photosensitive paper of the same type as for the negative. And also - in the invention of a special small camera with an inch window, which Talbot used instead of a camera obscura - this made it possible to increase its light efficiency. Talbot's first shot was a barred window in a room that belonged to the scientist's family. He called his method "calotype", which meant "beautiful print", receiving a patent for it in 1841.
Color photography was invented by James Clerk Maxwell, an outstanding British scientist of the 19th century.
Using the theory of three primary colors, in 1861 he presented to the scientific community the first color photograph. It was a photograph of a tartan ribbon (plaid ribbon), taken through three filters - green, red and blue (solutions of salts of various metals were used).
The Russian photographer, inventor, traveler Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky also made his contribution to the development of color photography.
He managed to develop a new sensitizer, which made the light sensitivity of the photographic plate uniform to the entire spectrum, which made it possible to give natural colors to the photograph. At the beginning of the century, while traveling in Russia, he took a huge number of color photographs. Below are some of them to get an idea of the quality of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's shots.
The engine room of the Hindu Kush hydroelectric power station on the Murghab River. 1911
The photograph is considered to be one of the greatest inventions last century.
In 1826, he creates the first photograph of a real environment - a view from his window. This required an 8-hour exposure.
(28 March 1819 - 8 August 1869) was a pioneer of photography in Britain, and one of the first war photographers. He played a big role in the overall development of photography.
Storyinventions and photography development
Translated from Greek, the word "photography" means light painting. Photography is a set of methods for obtaining images as a result of the action of light on special light-sensitive materials and the subsequent chemical processing of these materials.
The invention of "instant" photography, that is, a technology that allows you to capture a moment on a negative, was a huge success at the end of the 19th century. The fashion for photography grew. Associations were created that united numerous lovers. This movement was called pictorialism - from English word picture, meaning "picture". One of the pictorialists, the American Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), demonstrated that photography allows you to display all the nuances of the state of the atmosphere and the time of year and day at the time of the picture. These landscapes sometimes resemble Impressionist paintings.
The invention of photography became possible thanks to the work of scientists and inventors from many countries of the world. They studied the effect of light on light-sensitive substances, developed methods for producing durable light-painted images with their help, and improved the camera obscura (the device was the predecessor of the camera; in literal translation it means "dark room").
Back in 350 BC, the famous ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle noted in one of his works that light penetrating into a dark room through a small hole in the shutter forms an image of objects on the street in front of the window on the opposite wall. At the same time, the scale of the image is the larger, the farther from the window the wall is. This effect has been used for various experiments and drawings.
One of the earliest descriptions of a camera obscura (stenope) belongs to the famous Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci. Many other researchers also wrote about the camera obscura in their works.
On fig. depicts a drawing of a camera obscura by the Goldand physicist and mathematician Gemm Frisius, with the help of which he observed a solar eclipse in 1544.
Later, the camera obscura effect was used in a number of portable instrument designs. Some of them outwardly resembled modern pavilion cameras.
In 1568, the Venetian D. Barbaro first gave detailed description a pinhole camera with a plano-convex lens, which makes it possible to increase the effective opening for the rays penetrating the camera and to enhance the brightness of the optical image obtained with its help.
A great merit in improving the optical system of the camera obscura belongs to the famous German astronomer I. Kepler. In 1611, he created an optical system consisting of concave and convex lenses, which made it possible to increase the field of view of the camera obscura.
Observations of the chemical action of light on various substances were also of great importance.
Famous Russian statesman and the researcher A.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin observed in 1725 a change in the color of ferric chloride, which, under the action of light, turned into chloride.
The first targeted studies on the change in the properties of silver salts when exposed to light belong to the German scientist I. Schulze. In 1727, he discovered that when chalk is impregnated with a solution of silver in nitric acid, the mixture acquires the property of changing color in those places where sunlight acts on it.
The next important step in expanding knowledge about the properties of silver salts was made by the Swedish chemist K. Scheele, who in the 70s of the 18th century. conducted research on the effect of various colors of the solar spectrum on silver salts. At the same time, he noted that the rays of the blue-violet zone have the greatest activity.
Studies of the sensitivity of various compounds to light were carried out in the 18th-19th centuries. and other scientists.
The invention of photography was preceded by the work of the British T. Wedgwood and G. Devi. At the end of the XVIII century. T. -Wedgwood conducted a series of experiments to obtain light-painted drawings on paper and leather coated with silver nitrate.
T. Wedgwood was one of the first researchers who tried, although not entirely successfully, to get an image using a camera obscura. The works of T. Wedgwood were continued by G. Devi. To obtain an image in the camera obscura, he used silver chloride. Despite the fact that T. Wedgwood and G. Devi could not find a way to fix images, they are rightfully considered the forerunners of the invention of photography.
The Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was the first to get a lasting image. For the first time, he was informed about the new method in 1822. In 1829, Nicéphore Niépce started working together with the French artist and inventor Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre.
N. Niepce's method, which he called heliography (sun-writing), was as follows: a solution of asphalt in lavender oil was applied in a thin layer on a metal plate, then a translucent line drawing was applied to it and left for a long time in the light, which tanned the asphalt in illuminated areas. After that, the plate was transferred to a vessel with lavender oil, which washed out the unhardened sections of asphalt, resulting in a relief image. Using it as a cliché, it was possible to make typographical prints on paper. In 1826, N. Niepce used a camera obscura to obtain images on the asphalt layer.
The French artist and inventor Jacques Daguerre is considered to be the inventor of the first method of obtaining photographic images: on photographic layers with silver halide. Using a camera obscura for drawing, he began in 1824 to look for a means to fix the image received in non. In 1829-1835. J. Dagsre carried out this work together with N. Nieps. After the death of N. Pisps, J. Daguerre published a new original method for obtaining photographic images and called it daguerreotype.
The message about the new invention was made on January 7, 1839 by the famous physicist and astronomer Arago at a meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences. The essence of the method was outlined on August 19, 1839 in Arago's report to the joint meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts. The IX International Congress of Scientific and Applied Photography, held in 1935, decided to consider January 7, 1839, the anniversary date - the day of the invention of photography .
The principle of obtaining photographic images by the daguerreaux method was that the silver plate was first carefully cleaned and then placed in a special box above a vessel with a metal hearth. Evaporating, iodine settled on its surface and, interacting with silver, gave silver iodide - a substance sensitive to light. After that, in the dark, the plate was placed in a camera obscura cassette and brightly illuminated objects were exposed to it with an exposure of several minutes. Under the action of light on the plate, a faint image was obtained. It was enhanced, that is, it was shown with mercury vapor, which settled on areas exposed to light. This process was carried out in a special box, at the bottom of which a vessel with mercury was placed. To speed up the process of mercury evaporation, the vessel was heated.
Salt solution was used to remove traces of silver from the unexposed areas and thereby fix the image. Somewhat later, sodium thiosulfate began to be used for these purposes.
The image on the daguerreotype consisted of areas covered with a thin layer of mercury and silver. At a certain angle of inclination, a positive image was clearly visible on the daguerreon.
Thus, as a result of the daguerreotype process, a single image was obtained, which was one of its significant drawbacks. In addition, the high cost of images should be pointed out. Despite these shortcomings, daguerreotypy quickly attracted attention.
In 1840, the English researcher D. F. Godard managed to significantly increase the photosensitivity of daguerreotype plates by treating them with a mixture of iodine and bromine, which made it possible to reduce exposure times. The improvement of shooting optics also contributed to the reduction in shutter speeds. Thus, already in 1840, that is, a year after the official publication of the first method of photography, I. Petzval, a professor at the University of Vienna, developed a method for calculating photographic lenses. In the same year, he designed the first portrait lens, which was then built by the famous German optician P. F. Vochtländer.
A great contribution to the development of photography was made by the English scientist William Henry Foke Talbot. He received a relatively highly sensitive paper, which he made by applying a layer of a chloride salt solution and then sensing it with a solution of silver nitrate. Dry paper was exposed in a camera obscura. The resulting image was fixed in a salt solution. This method, called photogenic drawing, was outlined by Talbot in his first official communication to the Royal. Society January 31, 1839
Talbot also used sensitized paper to print from the paper negatives obtained during the shooting, which he exposed under the paper negative in strong light. Upon reaching a sufficient density of the image, it was fixed.
The emergence of the terms "photography", "negative", "positive", proposed by the English scientist D. Herschel, also belongs to this period. He also suggested using sodium thiosulfate solution to fix photographic images. Continuing his work in the field of photography, in 1840 Talbot invented the calotting process, the essence of which was as follows. A solution of silver nitrate was applied to a sheet of paper and, after a short drying time, it was immersed in a solution of potassium iodide and dried. Next, the paper was covered with a solution of silver nitrate, gallic and acetic acids and dried again. The paper was developed with the same solution after exposure. At the same time, a negative image was obtained on paper. If the density negative was weak, then it was strengthened by heating. To fix the image, Talbot first used a solution of potassium bromide, and later a solution of sodium thiosulfate. From the negative obtained in this way, contact printing of positive copies was made on paper, sensitized and developed in the same way.
It should be noted that until 1851 daguerreotype remained the most competitive way of photography. By this time, the English researcher Frederick Scott Archer had developed a new method of photography - the wet collodion process.
The principle of the wet collodion process is as follows. Nitrocellulose (a product of processing cotton waste with sulfuric and nitric acids) is dissolved in a mixture of alcohol and ether. Salts of iodine and bromine are introduced into the resulting mass - collodion, and the solution is poured onto a glass plate. After the layer hardens slightly, the raw plate is immersed in a vessel with soluble silver nitrate, i.e., the collodion layer is sensed. All operations are performed under non-actinic lighting. As a result chemical reaction in the collodion layer, silver halides are formed - substances that are sensitive to light. After that, the raw plate is placed in the camera and the object is photographed. It is developed in a solution of pyrogallic acid, or pyrogallol, and fixed in a solution of sodium thiosulfate.
The plates could not be dried, as the print collodion cracked and flaked off the glass. This was a significant drawback of the wet collodion process, and it was used mainly in stationary photo studios. There were also enthusiasts - landscape photographers who took with them camping laboratories in the form of tents when leaving for shooting, which were transported assembled on carts.
Simultaneously with the improvement of the wet collodion process, theoretical work was carried out. In 1855-1861 English physicist D.K. Maxwell develops the theory of three-color photography.
Due to the shortcomings of the wet collodion process, many researchers have attempted to replace collodion with other substances. So, in the 90s of the 19th century, experiments were carried out on the use of gelatin as a binding medium for the emulsion layer. During this period, one of the works described an alkaline developer containing an organic developing substance in its composition.
Based on the work of his predecessors, the Englishman Richard Medox, a doctor by profession, proposed in 1871 the first practical method for making a silver bromide gelatin emulsion. Thanks to this method, it became possible not only to keep photographic plates dry, but also to significantly increase their photosensitivity. It should be noted that the main method of modern photography is also based on the use of silver halide gelatin photolayers. Since the invention, this method has undergone significant improvements. The overall light sensitivity of the photo layer was increased, and the zone of its spectral sensitivity was expanded up to infrared rays. The principle of sensing photographic plates to the long-wavelength region of the spectrum was developed in 1873 by the German scientist G. W. Vogel. For these purposes, i.e., for the orthochromatization of photographic plates, he used coralline.
At the end of the 80s of the XIX century. The American company Kodak mastered the production of negative photographic films on a flexible celluloid substrate.
Thus, the entire period of development of photography can be divided into three stages: daguerreotype, wet collodion process and the process using silver halide gelatin emulsions.