Before the camera
Photographs of our friends, family, favourite sports and movie stars, and musicians are all around us. Our books, our magazines, and our lives are filled with their sharp, colorful images. Yet less than 150 years ago, photography as we know it know did not exist. The idea of someone picking up a small box, aim it, push a button and capture an image forever would've seemed like some kind of magic trick, not an art available to all people.
Long before the invention of the camera, humans had a powerful desire to capture images of the world around them. As many as 50 thousand years ago, ancient people were already carving pictures into animal bones, the human drive to reproduce the objects in our world led to great flowering of paintings on the walls of some caves. Prehistoric artists created pictures of the animals they watched and hunted. In many cases these animals were so carefuly and accurately painted that they are being studied by today's scientists for clues of how ancient animals looked.
Long before the invention of the camera, humans had a powerful desire to capture images of the world around them. As many as 50 thousand years ago, ancient people were already carving pictures into animal bones, the human drive to reproduce the objects in our world led to great flowering of paintings on the walls of some caves. Prehistoric artists created pictures of the animals they watched and hunted. In many cases these animals were so carefuly and accurately painted that they are being studied by today's scientists for clues of how ancient animals looked.
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This camera obscura could be taken apart and moved from place to place. The artist would step inside the ''darkened room'' through a trapdoor and would then trace the images of the tower or village scene projected through the holes on either side.
Why did these artists take the time and do what must have been great effort to create such beautiful and detailed cave paintings? Why in the thousands of years since the fisrt primitive works of art, have humans in many cultures on earth continued to depict objects in their world? According to photography historian Arthur Goldsmith, there are both complex and simple reasons for people to copy their surroundings. ''Making pictures of the world of visible reality and of the dreams and visions in our heads is a way of relating to ourselves to existence, to express our feelings about it, and to attempt to understand and also control it,'' Goldshmith explains. ''Even more fundamental, perhaps, it is an intrinsically satisfying act.'' he adds. In other words we would say, we draw and paint because doing so makes us happy. Throughout history, artists have had problems capturing and reproducing the depth of three-dimensional landscapes, and distant horizons in the two dimensions of paper or canvas. Aristotle in ancient Greece and the Arabs around A.D 1000 were familiar with the principle of what we now call the camera obscura (Latin for ''darkened room''). It was a small opening in a darkened room projected an upside down image of the outside world on an opposite wall. Sunlight would be filtering through leaves in a dark forest projected n image of foliage on the ground. Sometime during the 16th century these divergent bits of information were put together in order to make a small box which became the first camera obscura. ''When the images of illuminated objects pass through a small round hole into a very dark room,'' Amazed Leonardo Da Vincci wrote, ''you will see on the paper all those objects in their natural shapes and colors.''
It was true. Light passing though out a small hope (like a pinhole) projects a detailed though upside down image of an outside scene into a wall, screen, or another surface in a dark room. A large hole produces a larger but vaguer image. if the hole was to big, all that was projected was a patch of light in the shape of the hole itself. by late 16th century a basic type of camera obscura ws used by some painters to do a realistic sensation of a depth in their paintings. A later refinement was make by placing a small lens in the hole to produce sharper images.
It was true. Light passing though out a small hope (like a pinhole) projects a detailed though upside down image of an outside scene into a wall, screen, or another surface in a dark room. A large hole produces a larger but vaguer image. if the hole was to big, all that was projected was a patch of light in the shape of the hole itself. by late 16th century a basic type of camera obscura ws used by some painters to do a realistic sensation of a depth in their paintings. A later refinement was make by placing a small lens in the hole to produce sharper images.
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The camera obscura eventually began to resemble a camera in many ways. All that was needed was a way to preserve the images being projected inside the box.
By the 18th century, the camera obscura had shrunk enough that it hardly looked like a ''darkened room'' at all. Smaller versions fit inside wooden boxes that could be carried under the artist's arm. They contained a lens in the front that focused the image into a screen made of ground glass(semitransparent) in the back of a box. Serious artists used completely clear glass and tracing paper. In another important advance, a mirror was added behind the lens, which reflected the image into a piece of paper or ground glass screen on top of the box The image was right-side up and on a horizontal surface, which made if lot easier for an artist to trace it accurately. Later improvements took over, which inlcuded having an adjustable lens ( allowing focousing) and an iris diaphragm. It was made up of overlapping metal blades that would contract over the lens surface in order to regulate the amount of light allowed to hit the paper, sharpening the image a lot further.
By the 18th century the camera obscura was almoast a camera as we know it today. Its major drawback was that it lacked some automatic way of recording the images being let in through the hole some way, in the words of a man named William Henry Fox Talbot, to use the sun's energy to preserve the camera obscura's ''fairy picture's, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.'' Early in the 1800's, Talbot and a few other brilliant inventors began to think that this seemingly magical possibility might be something they could actually achieve. They had the basics of a camera. Now it was time to invent photography.