Photography

It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photolithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.

Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure.

[19] He also first understood the relationship between the focal point and the pinhole,[20] and performed early experiments with afterimages, laying the foundations for the invention of photography in the 19th century.

A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper.

It is a box with a small hole in one side, which allows specific light rays to enter, projecting an inverted image onto a viewing screen or paper.

[23] In June 1802, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance.

In 1826 he made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e., of the image of a real-world scene, as formed in a camera obscura by a lens).

[31] Because Niépce's camera photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days), he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical.

In partnership with Louis Daguerre, he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced visually superior results and replaced the bitumen with a more light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were still required.

Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the several-minutes-long exposure to be visible.

Meanwhile, a British inventor, William Fox Talbot, had succeeded in making crude but reasonably light-fast silver images on paper as early as 1834[32] but had kept his work secret.

After reading about Daguerre's invention in January 1839, Talbot published his hitherto secret method in a paper to the Royal Society[32] and set about improving on it.

In both its original and calotype forms, Talbot's process, unlike Daguerre's, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies; this is the basis of most modern chemical photography up to the present day, as daguerreotypes could only be replicated by rephotographing them with a camera.

He had discovered in 1819 that sodium thiosulphate was a solvent of silver halides, and in 1839 he informed Talbot (and, indirectly, Daguerre) that it could be used to "fix" silver-halide-based photographs and make them completely light-fast.

Because of the superior dimensional stability of glass, the use of plates for some scientific applications, such as astrophotography, continued into the 1990s, and in the niche field of laser holography, it has persisted into the 21st century.

Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost, chemical stability, and its "classic" photographic look.

Monochrome printing or electronic display can be used to salvage certain photographs taken in color which are unsatisfactory in their original form; sometimes when presented as black-and-white or single-color-toned images they are found to be more effective.

[43][44] The foundation of virtually all practical color processes, Maxwell's idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green and blue filters.

Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made extensive use of this color separation technique, employing a special camera which successively exposed the three color-filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate.

The dualphoto apparatus can be used to simultaneously capture both the subject and the photographer, or both sides of a geographical place at once, thus adding a supplementary narrative layer to that of a single image.

For instance, a photocopy or xerography machine forms permanent images but uses the transfer of static electrical charges rather than photographic medium, hence the term electrophotography.

[56] Twenty-first century social media and near-ubiquitous camera phones have made photographic and video recording pervasive in everyday life.

Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne?

[58]On 7 February 2007, Sotheby's London sold the 2001 photograph 99 Cent II Diptychon for an unprecedented $3,346,456 to an anonymous bidder, making it the most expensive at the time.

In parallel to this development, the then largely separate interface between painting and photography was closed in the second half of the 20th century with the chemigram of Pierre Cordier and the chemogram of Josef H.

These works of art were almost simultaneous with the invention of photography by various important artists who characterized Hippolyte Bayard, Thomas Wedgwood, William Henry Fox Talbot in their early stages, and later Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the twenties and by the painter in the thirties Edmund Kesting and Christian Schad by draping objects directly onto appropriately sensitized photo paper and using a light source without a camera.

[62] In 1845 Francis Ronalds, the Honorary Director of the Kew Observatory, invented the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of meteorological and geomagnetic parameters.

[71] The camera doesn't rape or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.

Many photojournalists have declared they will not crop their pictures or are forbidden from combining elements of multiple photos to make "photomontages", passing them as "real" photographs.

[75] In the UK, a recent law (Counter-Terrorism Act 2008) increases the power of the police to prevent people, even press photographers, from taking pictures in public places.

Photography of Sierra Nevada
A camera obscura used for drawing
Earliest known surviving heliographic engraving, 1825, printed from a metal plate made by Nicéphore Niépce . [ 29 ] The plate was exposed under an ordinary engraving and copied it by photographic means. This was a step towards the first permanent photograph taken with a camera.
View from the Window at Le Gras , 1826, the earliest surviving camera photograph. Original plate (left) and colorized reoriented enhancement (right).
Carl August von Steinheil and Franz von Kobell 's silver chloride photograph of Frauenkirche from the Old Academy , March 1837 [ 30 ]
View of the Boulevard du Temple , a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph to include people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure lasted for several minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one of them apparently having his boots polished by the other, remained in one place long enough to be visible.
A latticed window in Lacock Abbey , England , photographed by William Fox Talbot in 1835. Shown here in positive form, this may be the oldest extant photographic negative made in a camera.
Wilson Chinn , a branded slave from Louisiana—per The New York Times , "one of the earliest and most dramatic examples of how the newborn medium of photography could change the course of history." [ 37 ]
Advertisement for Campbell's Photograph Gallery from The Macon City Directory, c. 1877
Undeveloped Arista black-and-white film, ISO 125/22°
A photographic darkroom with safelight
The first color photograph made by the three-color method suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton . The subject is a colored, tartan patterned ribbon.
Color photography was possible long before Kodachrome , as this 1903 portrait by Sarah Angelina Acland demonstrates, but in its earliest years, the need for special equipment, long exposures, and complicated printing processes made it extremely rare.
Kodak DCS 100, based on a Nikon F3 body with Digital Storage Unit
Photography on a smartphone
Angles such as vertical, horizontal, or as pictured here diagonal are considered important photographic techniques.
An example of a dualphoto using a smartphone based app
This image of the rings of Saturn is an example of the application of ultraviolet photography in astronomy .
Devices other than cameras can be used to record images. Trichome of Arabidopsis thaliana seen via scanning electron microscope . Note that image has been edited by adding colors to clarify structure or to add an aesthetic effect. Heiti Paves from Tallinn University of Technology .
Example of a studio-made food photograph
Classic Alfred Stieglitz photograph, The Steerage (1907) shows unique aesthetic of black-and-white photos.
Josef H. Neumann : Gustav I (1976)
National Guardsman in Washington D.C. in 2021
Wootton bridge collapse in 1861
Mute swans and their cygnets photographed on Wolvercote lakes
Photography may be used both to capture reality and to produce a work of art . While photo manipulation was often frowned upon at first, it was eventually used to great extent to produce artistic effects. Nude composition 19 from 1988 by Jaan Künnap .
The Musée de l'Élysée , founded in 1985 in Lausanne , was the first photography museum in Europe.