Photography Timeline

The Eriksen Version

5th Century

• Greek philosophers describe the optical principles of the camera obscura

The camera obscura (Latin for 'dark room')

• is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side.

• Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved.

• The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation.

1553

• Giovanni Battista Porta publishes details of construction and use of the camera obscura. It is first used to view solar eclipses

1664-1666

• Isaac Newton discovers that white light is composed of different colors

1725-1727

• Johann Heinrich Schulze discovers and experiments with the darkening action of light on mixtures of chalk and silver nitrate

1806

• William Hyde Wollaston invents the camera lucida

Camera Lucida

• performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing.

• The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure. This allows the artist to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, thus aiding in the accurate rendering of perspective.

• At times, the artist can even trace the outlines of objects.

1814-1826

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce achieves his first photographic image with a camera obscura

One of the two earliest known evidences of photographic activity, taken by Nicéphore Niépce

in 1825 by the heliograph process

1819

• John Herschel discovers the photographic fixative, hyposulfite of soda and coined the term photography.

1825

• Peter Mark Roget demonstrates the persistence of vision with his Thaumatrope

Thaumatrope

• is a toy that was popular in Victorian times. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.

• Roget, who used one to demonstrate persistence of vision to the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1824. He based his invention on ideas of the astronomer John Herschel and the geologist William Henry Fitton.

• The coined name translates roughly as "wonder turner" in modern Greek.

1826

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce uses bitumen of Judea for photographs on metal, makes the first successful camera photograph on a pewter plate: »View From My Window at Gras« - a direct positive he called a »heliograph«. Exposure was approximately eight hours.

View From My Window at Gras

1832-33

• Image animation novelties Phenakistoscope and Zoetrope invented

1837

• Daguerre's first daguerreotype

Daguerreotype

• in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor.

• In later developments bromine and chlorine vapors were also used, resulting in shorter exposure times.

• The daguerreotype is a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the image and makes it appear positive in the proper light.

• Thus, daguerreotype is a direct photographic process without the capacity for duplication.

1840

• Alexander Wolcott issued first American patent in photography for his camera

1846

• Carl Zeiss opens optical instrument factory in Germany

• First known photograph, a daguerreotype, is taken of The White House and President (Polk) and First Lady by John Plumbe, Jr.

1856

• Photojournalism of Crimean War by Roger Fenton, James Robertson, and Carol Popp de Scathmari

• Thomson takes the first underwater photograph at a depth of 5 feet

Photojournalism

• is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that creates images in order to tell a news story.

• It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, and in some cases to video used in broadcast journalism or for personal use.

1871

• Pigeons used to carry micro photographed messages across enemy lines in Franco-Prussian War.

1872

• John W. Hyatt begins manufacturing celluloid with the intention of manufacturing billiard balls, which until that time were made from ivory.

Muybridge

• begins photographic motion studies and continues project until 1887; the first photographs are of a horse in motion

Platinotype

• are photographic prints made by a monochrome printing process that provides the greatest tonal range of any printing method using chemical development.

• Unlike the silver print process, platinum lies on the paper surface, while silver lies in a gelatin or albumen emulsion that coats the paper. As a result, since no gelatin emulsion is used, the final platinum image is absolutely matte with a deposit of platinum (and/or palladium, its sister element which is also used in most platinum photographs) absorbed slightly into the paper.[1]

1873

• The platinotype process is patented by Willis in England

Before development After development

1888

• Eastman markets the Kodak camera and roll film-

• "You Press The Button and We Do The Rest."

1889

• George Eastman applies for patent on motion-picture roll film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kodak_ad_1888.GIF

1891

• The first telephoto lenses begin to appear

1893

• Thomas Alva Edison patents the kinetoscope

Kinetoscope

• The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. Though not a movie projector—it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components—the Kinetoscope introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video.

• It creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetoscope

1900

• First mass-marketed camera, The Brownie

• is the name of a long-running and extremely popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak.

• The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900,[1] was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm.

• With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, leading to the popular slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest."

• The camera was named after the popular cartoons created by Palmer Cox.

1904

• The Lumiere brothers announce the production of Autochrome plates for making camera images in full color

1913

• Eastman Kodak Company establishes first industrial photographic research laboratory

1935

• Eastman Kodak markets Kodachrome film

Kodachrome

• is the trademarked brand name of a type of color reversal film that was manufactured by Eastman Kodak from 1935 to 2009.

• Kodachrome was the first successfully mass-marketed color still film using a subtractive method, in contrast to earlier additive "screenplate" methods such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, and remained the oldest brand of color film.

• On June 22, 2009 Eastman Kodak Co. announced the end of Kodachrome production, citing declining demand.

1948

• Edwin Land markets the Polaroid camera

Digital Cameras

The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak.

It used the then-new solid-state CCD image sensor chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973.

The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production.

1987

• Eastman Kodak enters the electronic still-video market with seven products for recording, storing, manipulating, transmitting and printing electronic still video images

1988

• Sony and Fuji announce new digital cameras

•Eastman Kodak announces a 4 megapixel CCD

•PhotoMac is the first image manipulation program available for the Macintosh computer

1990

• Adobe Photoshop 1.0 (TM) is the second professional image manipulation program available for Macintosh computers

•Eastman Kodak prototypes an electronic camera back designed for the needs of photojournalists

1993

• Adobe Photoshop is available for MS-DOS/Windows platforms

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