28/04/2014
Photography is a word derived from the Greek
words photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw")
The word was first used by the scientist Sir John
F.W. Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording
images by the action of light, or related radiation,
on a sensitive material..
Photography. An art form invented in 1830s,
becoming publicly recognised ten years later.
Today, photography is the largest growing hobby
in the world with the hardware alone creating a
multi-billion dollar industry. Not everyone knows
what Camera Obscura or even Shutter Speed is,
nor have many heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson or
even Annie Leibovitz.
Today we take a step back and take a look at
how this fascinating technique was created and
developed, because proudly knowing the past is
the primary way to create a great future.
Camera Obscura
Before photography was created, people already
knew the principles of how it eventually got to
work. They could process the image on the wall
or piece of paper, however no printing was
possible at the time as preserving light turned
out to be a lot harder task than projecting it. The
instrument that people used for processing
pictures was called the Camera Obscura (which
is Latin for the Dark Room) and it was around
for a few centuries before photography came
along.
It is believed that Camera Obscura was invented
around 13-14th centuries, however there is a
manuscript by an Arabian scholar Hassan ibn
Hassan dated 10th century that describes the
principles on which camera obscura works and
on which analogue photography is based today..
Camera Obscura is essentially a dark, closed
space in the shape of a box with a hole on one
side of it. The hole has to be small enough in
proportion to the box to make the camera
obscura work properly. The way it works is that
due, to optical laws, the light coming through a
tiny hole transforms and creates an image on the
surface that it meets, i.e. the wall of the box.
The image was mirrored and upside down,
however, so basically everything that makes
today's analogue camera's principles different to
camera obscura ones are the mirrors and the
film which is used to capture and preserve the
image created by the light.
Photography, the way it was developing, was
always believed to be the killer of the fine art.
However, it is believed that the photo principles
were widely used by Renaissance artists like
Leonardo, Michelangelo and others. In the mid
16th century, Giovanni Battista della
Portacentury, an Italian scholar, wrote an essay
on how to use camera obscura in aid of making
the drawing process easier. He projected the
image of people outside the camera obscura on
the canvas inside of it (camera obscura was a
rather big room in this case) and then drew over
the image or tried to copy it.
The method is quite similar to that which was
used in the Retroscope drawing in the animation
industry in early twentieth century. The process
of using camera obscura looked very strange and
frightening for the people at those times and the
Giovanni Battista had to drop the idea after he
was arrested and prosecuted on a charge of
sorcery.
This is a picture of camera obscura in action the
way it was used back then..
Even though only few of the Renaissance artists
admitted they used camera obscura as an aid in
drawing, it is believed most of them did. The
reason for not openly admitting it was the fear
of being charged of association with occultism or
simply not wanting to admit something many
artists called cheating.
Today we can state that camera obscura was a
prototype of the modern photo camera. Even
though it seems useless today, many people still
find it amusing and use it for artistic reasons or
simply for fun. Installing film and permanently
capturing an image was a logical progression..!!
