Harshavardhan. P
I EIE
Photography is a blend of art and science. It captures a specific time and shapes it into a picture. Since its inception, photography has come a long way and has carved its place as part of humanity. By capturing important moments and significant events, photography in a way keeps images and feelings alive.
Photography is believed to have begun in the 19th century, following the development of the camera obscura, a device that projected an image of the outside world onto a surface inside a darkened room or box. While the camera obscura was not used for capturing permanent images, it laid the groundwork for the invention of photography. The first permanent photograph is credited to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who, in 1826 or 1827, created the View from the Window at Le Gras using a process called heliography. This early photograph was quite grainy and required several hours of exposure, but it marked a significant milestone in the development of photographic technology.
In 1839, Louis Daguerre, working with Niépce, introduced the daguerreotype, which
was a much more advanced photographic process. The daguerreotype produced clearer, more detailed images than Niépce’s heliograph and became the first commercially successful photographic process. It involved exposing a silver-coated copper plate to iodine vapor, making it light-sensitive, and then capturing an image using light in a camera, with the photo being developed using mercury vapor. The daguerreotype represented a major leap forward in the history of photography.
As time went on, the arts grew increasingly popular and accessible to the public. George Eastman played a pivotal role in this by developing roll film and the Kodak camera, innovations that made photography widely available and turned it into a household activity by the late 19th century. The 20th century saw a photographic revolution with innovations like color film, Polaroid instant cameras, and eventually digital cameras, which eliminated the need for traditional film altogether.
Nowadays all we need is a smartphone to capture time and space in a frame. Regardless of how the history of photography has progressed, the idea of capturing moments of time is still astonishing. Photographs eternalize memory and help us relive those precious moments of time.
References:
https://www.britannica.com/technology/photography
https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/brief-history-of-photography-2688527
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography
