Modern Digital Photography Is A Far Cry From Early Forms Of Photography
Photography has been around since the 1820's (though there is documented history that early experiments were conducted during the time of Plato). Thanks to modern technology, today's photography is simple, fast, and highly popular. For less than a few hundred dollars, anyone can take their love of photography and turn it into a profitable business.
Experiments with the pinhole camera and the camera obscura were conducted in the time of the philosopher Plato. Not until the 1820's was photography as we know it invented. Two French inventors, Neipce and Daguerre, teamed up to combine their notes and studies and create what became the highly popular daguerreotype, which was a photograph burned into glass or metal in shades of black and white. The term "photography" was not invented until 1832, when the word was first used by Herschel during a lecture at The Royal Society of London. The term stuck and is still part of our vocabulary today.
Like any new invention, photography had its critics. Many people believed that photography would put painters and sculptors out of work. In practice, it actually helped these visual artists because they no longer had to work from memory or use a live model, thus making their work easier to perform as well as less costly to the consumer.
In its early days, photography was expensive and development of the pictures, known as exposure, was time consuming. Some exposures required up to ten hours to fully develop an image! The very first known photograph of a person, taken by Neipce on a Paris street in the 1820's, took over 8 hours to produce. Innovations and developments in the art of photography led to Matthew Brady's famous photographs of the carnage of the Civil War.
Eventually, in the 20th century, George Eastman developed film and negatives, and the Kodak Company in conjunction with Eastman developed a cameral known as the Little Brownie in the 1930's. This allowed individuals to learn to take photographs of their own. However, they still had to wait weeks for their film to get developed at a traditional photo development studio. The only way to avoid sending your negatives to a developer for processing was to develop the prints yourself and that required your own dark room. And since very few people had enough extra money to build and develop their own dark room, the photo development business began to boom.
Today's cameras are digital. They use pixels and computer chips to capture images. Now almost anyone can take great photographs without film and chemicals, and with very little waiting to see the prints of the pictures taken with their digital cameras.
Digital cameras can be connected to a computer and their images downloaded to either a CD or the computer's hard drive. Photos taken with digital cameras can be even be edited before they are downloaded to storage. A photographer can easily remove red eye, pieces of unwanted background (like a trash can too close to the subject) or other undesirable inclusions.
Photography is the most popular hobby today. With the advent of digital cameras, almost anyone can call themselves a photographer, and even set up a business as photographer with very little training or investment.
Experiments with the pinhole camera and the camera obscura were conducted in the time of the philosopher Plato. Not until the 1820's was photography as we know it invented. Two French inventors, Neipce and Daguerre, teamed up to combine their notes and studies and create what became the highly popular daguerreotype, which was a photograph burned into glass or metal in shades of black and white. The term "photography" was not invented until 1832, when the word was first used by Herschel during a lecture at The Royal Society of London. The term stuck and is still part of our vocabulary today.
Like any new invention, photography had its critics. Many people believed that photography would put painters and sculptors out of work. In practice, it actually helped these visual artists because they no longer had to work from memory or use a live model, thus making their work easier to perform as well as less costly to the consumer.
In its early days, photography was expensive and development of the pictures, known as exposure, was time consuming. Some exposures required up to ten hours to fully develop an image! The very first known photograph of a person, taken by Neipce on a Paris street in the 1820's, took over 8 hours to produce. Innovations and developments in the art of photography led to Matthew Brady's famous photographs of the carnage of the Civil War.
Eventually, in the 20th century, George Eastman developed film and negatives, and the Kodak Company in conjunction with Eastman developed a cameral known as the Little Brownie in the 1930's. This allowed individuals to learn to take photographs of their own. However, they still had to wait weeks for their film to get developed at a traditional photo development studio. The only way to avoid sending your negatives to a developer for processing was to develop the prints yourself and that required your own dark room. And since very few people had enough extra money to build and develop their own dark room, the photo development business began to boom.
Today's cameras are digital. They use pixels and computer chips to capture images. Now almost anyone can take great photographs without film and chemicals, and with very little waiting to see the prints of the pictures taken with their digital cameras.
Digital cameras can be connected to a computer and their images downloaded to either a CD or the computer's hard drive. Photos taken with digital cameras can be even be edited before they are downloaded to storage. A photographer can easily remove red eye, pieces of unwanted background (like a trash can too close to the subject) or other undesirable inclusions.
Photography is the most popular hobby today. With the advent of digital cameras, almost anyone can call themselves a photographer, and even set up a business as photographer with very little training or investment.