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Monday 13 February 2017

Photography

The word photography comes from the Greek phōtos and graphé which put together mean "drawing with light."

The earliest known permanent photographic image was created by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a complex process called heliography, a print made from a photoengraved printing plate, in 1825. The exposure time needed to create that photograph was eight hours.

Earliest known surviving heliographic engraving, 1825, made by Nicéphore Niépce

The following year Niépce used a primitive camera, a camera obscura,  to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene.

In 1829 Niépce entered into a partnership with French artist Louis Daguerre and the two collaborated to work out a similar but more sensitive and otherwise improved process.

Niépce died suddenly in 1833, but Daguerre continued experimenting, and evolved the process which would subsequently be known as the daguerreotype.

The daguerreotype, invented in 1837, was the first practical photographic process.

The French government bought the patent for Daguerre's photographic process, the daguerreotype and announced on August 19, 1839 that they were releasing it as a gift “free to the world”. They agreed to award Daguerre an annuity of 6,000 Francs for the rest of his life, and to give the estate of Niépce 4,000 Francs yearly.

1840–1841 camerae obscurae and plates for daguerreotype By Edal Anton Lefterov -  Wikipedia

The first photography magazine, Daguerreian Journal, was published in New York City in 1856.

In 1856, Charles Dodgson, better known as Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, took up the new art form of photography; first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey and art photography pioneer Oscar Rejlander.

Dodgson soon excelled at the art, and as his fame with the camera grew mothers flocked to have their daughters immortalized. Once he had a studio of his own, Dodgson made portraits of notable sitters such as including the actress Ellen Terry and the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a darkroom installed at Windsor Castle to indulge their passion for photography.


In Britain photography of criminals became compulsory in 1870, with the institution of the first "Rogues Gallery."

Fujifilm, the photographic and electronics company, was founded in Tokyo, Japan in 1934.

The "red eye" effect in flash photographs is caused by the flash bouncing off your retina. When you see "red eye", you are literally seeing the back of your eyeball through your dilated pupils.

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