During the renaissance, the amusing phenomenon of the camera became the rage. Of course, we wouldn’t recognize these gadgets as the slick, uber cool cameras of today. They were literally a big box with a pin sized hole in it. The outside scene appears as a projected image, upside down and backwards, on the wall opposite the hole. So, a person, say Leonardo Davinci or even the more ancient Fred Flintstone, would trace what they saw on the wall and viola the world has its first photographs. Well, sort of, if Fred or Leo had projected the scene on a surface of ground glass, then we would have had the same thing as the first modern view camera.

So, fast forward from the Stone and Renaissance ages and into the year, 1670. Fifty years after the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, a guy named Robert Boyle discovered that putting a piece of tracing paper over the glass surface, he could easily trace the projected image and make a permanent record of the scene. Fine-tuning of his “camera” over the years led to the making of the Camera Lucida. This camera is very similar to the overhead projector you find in just about every classroom. A fun experiment to try is to point the lens of an overhead projector toward a window. Then, place a sheet of white paper where the transparency is normally placed. The scene outside the window will be projected on the paper and you can trace the scene. These kinds of cameras became popular with travelers. Tourists could then “take pictures” of the places they visited. These sketches were, then, colored and placed in an album.

Being the creatures that we are, our imaginations and curiosity got the better of us. We began to ponder the coolness and the futuristic possibilities of somehow getting that image projected on the paper to stick without having to lift a pencil. By the early 1800s, several people tackled the question of how to use chemical means to capture the image projected by the camera lens. This problem was finally solved by both L.J.M. Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. The technique developed by Fox Talbot is basically the same one used today. Here are the steps, first, a surface, film or paper is coated in light sensitive dark chemicals, then it is exposed to light and an image is captured. Finally, the picture is fixed through chemical treatment. This fixing process is done so, the image will not continue to change when exposed to light.

Almost instantly, this method became easy enough for any earnest amateur or professional to perform. Named after the inventor Louis Daguerre, this process called daguerreotype is a direct positive image on a copper plate that is coated with a thin layer of silver. The announcement of the French discovery prompted the Englishman, William Henry Fox Talbot, to publish details of a process he had discovered. It involved the production of a negative from which an unlimited number of positive images could be produced, a technique that formed the basis of many other photographic processes.

At first, both of the early processes required long exposures in the camera, but there were many improvements in the daguerreotype process during the 1840s. It was an exciting time for photography. That autumn, Talbot discovered that a brief exposure in the camera created a hidden negative image on paper that could be made visible by chemical treatment. This discovery is called calotype. It reduced exposure times and allowed photography of living subjects, thus, portrait photography became feasible.

The next big discovery was in 1871, just six years after the American Civil War. A Dr. Richard Maddox discovered that instead of using glass as a basis for the photographic plate he could use gelatin. This led to the dry plate process. This process could be developed so much quicker than any other process. It was soon, so, advanced that the idea of factory made photographic material was becoming possible. This was a turning point for photography, because you didn’t need the bulky wet-plates or darkroom tents. Very soon pictures would be able to be taken without a any elite knowledge.

Do you recognize this slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” In 1888, George Eastman, introduced the Kodak box camera. Four years earlier, Eastman had launched a campaign for flexible film. The very thing that made his camera easy to use. Now, photography was available to anyone who could afford a camera. In 1901, the same year as the first radio transmission made across the Atlantic Ocean by Guglielmo Marconi, photography became available to the masses with the Kodak Brownie. In the twentieth century, photography developed rapidly as a commercial service. For the modern photography fan, processing black and white film has not changed much since the launch of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925.

One of the early approaches for getting color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color filter in front of the lens. Then photographers could take these three negatives and use a viewer that showed all three slides superimposed on top of each other. But, color photography really came into play in 1873, when Herman Vogel discovered a method where film could become sensitive to green light.

In 1906, three years after the Wright Brothers took flight on a beach in North Carolina, panchromatic films were introduced. These films were sensitive to all colors. But, would you believe the meager potato was the unsung hero of early color photography. In 1907, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, produced plates called Autochrome. Which is based on a screen-plate method and was the first realistic color plate introduced. This is how it worked, and how the potato came into play, you used a screen plate with dyed dots of potato starch. A photographic emulsion or mix comes in contact with screen filtered red, green or blue dyed potato starch. The end result was a pastel version of real life.

In 1935 the same year Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo from Hawaii to California, the first modern color film, Kodachrome was introduced by a couple of American musicians, Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, who were working with the Kodak Research Laboratories. It is based on three colored emulsions. A reversal or slide film allowed for color transparencies that were fit both for both projection and reproduction of the image. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based on German technology developed for Agfacolor in 1936. It is a single-strip, three-layer negative film with additional print stock. After WWII, the named changed to Anscocolor in the U.S.

In 1963, a year after John Glenn, Jr. became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, instant color film was introduced by Polaroid. And we all remember the coolness factor of the magical Polaroid, just shake it and the image appeared. During the 1970s, however, color photography was viewed as something for commercial use only or as a means for amateurs to fill their family albums. Because of this, color photography remained about the same throughout this groovy decade.

Then, we had a bit of a technical revolution. Like before, our creativity and imaginations got the better of us and we, especially photojournalists, wanted to store our pictures in something better than film canisters. If you were the serious travel photographer you had to bring along a small portable photo lab kit, which was not very convenient. So, in 1981, Sony came up with the first consumer camera that used a charge-coupled device for imaging which eliminated the need for film. It was called the Sony Mavica and it saved images to a disk and were then shown on a T.V. It was not, yet, a fully digital camera. In 1990, the same year that the Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, Kodak showed off their DCS 100. It was the first commercially available digital camera. Because of the incredibly high price of these cameras, photojournalists and other professional photographers were mainly the only ones able to buy them; however, this was the beginning of commercial digital photography.

So, are you itching to know just how your digital camera works? Well, your camera uses an electronic image sensor to record the image instead of chemicals on film. The biggest difference between digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography resists manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper, but digital imaging is a very manipulative medium. Think, Adobe photoshop. So, it is easier to fix mistakes with a digital camera than with a film camera.

So, here we are in the 21st century and digital point-and-shoot cameras have taken over the world. Hands down, they outsell film cameras. Besides having the instant gratification of seeing exactly what you just shot, they include cool features like audio/video recording. Because of this popularity, in 2004, Kodak revealed that by the end of that year, they were going to stop selling the re-loadable 35 mm cameras in western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Then, two years later, in 2006, Nikon did the same thing, but left two of their models as film, followed by, Cannon later in the year, when they announced that they would stop making new film SLR cameras. So, despite it’s changes and throughout history this mysterious box has both amused and enthralled us. Hopefully, in the future when everybody owns a flying car, the camera will have continued to evolved and still capture our attention.

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