The word comes from the Greek words φως phos ("light"), and γραφις graphis ("stylus", "paintbrush") or γραφη graphê, together meaning "drawing with light" or "representation by means of lines" or "drawing."
Photographers control the camera to expose the light recording material (usually film or a Charge-coupled device) to light. After processing, this produces an image whose contents are acceptably sharp, bright and composed to achieve the objective of taking the photograph.
The controls include:
The controls are usually inter-related, for example brightness is aperture multiplied by shutter speed, and varying the focal length of the lens will allow greater control over the Depth of field.
Niépce, in Chalon-sur-Saône, and the artist Jacques Daguerre, in Paris, refined the existing silver process in a partnership. In 1833 Niépce died unexpectedly of a stroke, leaving his notes to Daguerre. While he had no scientific background, Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process. He discovered that by exposing the silver firstly to iodine vapour, before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, a Latent image could be formed and made visible. By then bathing the plate in a salt bath the image could be fixed. In 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the Daguerreotype. A similar process is still used today for Polaroids®. The French government bought the patent and immediately made it public domain.
Across the English Channel, William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention, Talbot refined his process, so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people as Daguerre had done, and by 1840 he had invented the Calotype process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride to create an intermediate negative image. Unlike a daguerreotype, a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, like most chemical films do today. Talbot patented this process, which greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography all together. But later this process was refined by George Eastman and is today the basic technology used by chemical film cameras. Hippolyte Bayard also developed a method of photography, but delayed announcing it and so was not recognized as its inventor. [image]
Several trends characterize the photographic industry from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The ratio of revenue from end-user photographic supplies to revenue from professional services rose by an order of magnitude. The prevalence of personal cameras and the ratio of end-user photographs rose closely in tandem with the prevalence of telephone and the telephone conversation minutes. However, the ratio of photographic industry revenue to telephone industry revenue dropped sharply.
Given the development of new digital technologies for creating and sharing images, and of new communications devices, e.g. camera phones, understanding the economics of image use are becoming increasingly important for understanding the evolution of the communications industry as a whole.
Resources
Jenkins, Reese V. Images & Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry 1839-1925. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. The book provides a fine overview of the economics of photography and is especially strong on the growth and development of the Eastman Kodak Company.
Color photography was explored throughout the 1800s. Initial experiments in color could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first permanent color photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color Filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a Darkroom or processing plant.
Practical application of the technique was held back by the very limited colour response of early film; however, in the early 1900s, following the work of photo-chemists such as H. W. Vogel, emulsions with adequate sensitivity to green and red light at last became available.
The first color film, Autochrome, thus did not reach the market until 1907; it was based on a 'screen-plate' filter made of dyed dots of potato starch. The first modern ('integrated tri-pack') color film, Kodachrome, was introduced in 1935 based on three colored emulsions. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based on technology developed for Agfacolor (as 'Agfacolor Neue') in 1936. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.
Color photography may form images as a positive transparency, intended for use in a Slide projector or as color negatives, intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography, owing to the introduction of automated photoprinting equipment.
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Traditional photography was a considerable burden for photographers working at remote locations (such as press correspondents) without access to processing facilities. With increased competition from television, there was pressure to deliver their images to newspapers ever faster. Photo-journalists at remote locations would carry a miniature photo lab with them, and some means of transmitting their images down the telephone line. In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a CCD for imaging, and which required no film -- the Sony Mavica. While the Mavica did save images to disk, the images themselves were displayed on television, and therefore the camera could not be considered fully digital. In 1990, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100, the first commercially available digital camera. Its cost precluded any use other than Photojournalism and professional applications, but commercial Digital photography was born.
Digital photography uses an electronic sensor such as a Charge-coupled device to record the image as a piece of electronic data rather than as chemical changes on film. Some other devices, such as cell phones, now include digital photography features.
In 10 years, digital cameras have become widespread consumer products. Digital cameras now outsell film cameras, and many include features not found in film cameras such as the ability to shoot Video and record audio.
Kodak announced in January 2004 that it would no longer produce reloadable 35-millimeter cameras after the end of that year. This was interpreted as a sign of the end of film photography, however Kodak was at that time a minor actor on the reloadable film cameras market. The price of 35mm and APS compact cameras have dropped, probably due to direct competition from digital and the resulting growth of the offer of second-hand film cameras. However, "wet" photography may endure, as dedicated amateurs and skilled artists often prefer the use of traditional and familiar materials and techniques.
The market for photographic services demonstrates the cliché "one picture is worth a thousand words," which has an interesting basis in the . Magazines and newspapers, companies putting up Web sites, advertising agencies and other groups pay for photography.
Many people take photographs for self-fulfillment or for commercial purposes. Organizations with a budget and a need for photography have several options: they can assign a member of the organization, hire someone, run a public competition, or obtain rights to stock photographs.
PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS: International Stock Imagery Association International Stock Imagery Association
In digital photography, the term image has begun to replace photograph. This term is neither more nor less correct than photograph, either in film or digital photography. (The term image is traditional in geometric optics.)
Digital photography is not considered a form of photography but the creation of a digital image for file. Photography is specified by a combination of a chemical(developers) and physical(film) changes.
During the twentieth century, both fine art photography & Documentary photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the USA, a small handful of curators spent their lives struggling to put it there, with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and John Szarkowski, and Hugh Edwards the most prominent among them.
Yet the Aesthetics of photography is a matter that continues to be discussed. Is photography an Art - or is it just the mechanical reproduction of an image? If photography is authentically art, what makes a photograph beautiful? Is there a kinship between the beauty of an Atget and a Rembrandt?
The controversy began with the earliest images "written with light": Niépce, Daguerre, and others among the very earliest photographers were met with wonder, but some questioned if it was really art.
Clive Bell in his classic essay "Art" states that only one thing can distinguish art from what is not art: "significant form." Bell wrote: "There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions." Text of Bell's essay.
Others have since examined if this criterion be applied to photography. This question has been examined by the Aesthetic Realism understanding of beauty. Some of the most important writing on this subject is to be found on the web sites of Len Bernstein, Louis Dienes, Amy Dienes, and David M. Bernstein: photographers and critics. Len Bernstein has described the Aesthetic Realism understanding of photography as an art form in essays which have been published for example in Apogee Photo Magazine and in Photographica World: The Journal of the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain.
On his web site he introduces the subject as follows: "When I began to photograph more than 25 years ago, I felt I found a way of expressing myself that met something so deep inside me that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. Walking with my camera, the city streets seemed transformed - friendlier, more interesting - and I spent hours searching for dramatic situations, trying to capture the right moment. Looking through the viewfinder, what I saw had new value for me, boredom and loneliness seemed to vanish, and I wished I could feel that way all the time. And hoping to learn what made a photograph successful, I avidly studied the history and technique of photography.
"My hopes were met when I first heard this magnificent statement by Eli Siegel, the American critic and founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism: 'All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.' This is the criterion for beauty that centuries of artists, philosophers, people in all walks of life, have searched for; the explanation of what makes a photograph good and how our personal questions are the questions of art - dignified and cultural! I've had the thrill of testing it in thousands of instances, from the first known photograph taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826-27 to the most modern work of today." For an online exhibition of Bernstein's photographs click here.
Likewise, important articles (referred to above) on photography as an art form, written from the Aesthetic Realism point of view, will be found on the David M. Bernstein web site "What Does a Person Deserve? The Answer Found in a Great Photograph" and the "Dienes & Dienes" web site. See, for example Amy Dienes' "The Self Alone & The Self Going Out; or, Cartier-Bresson's Photo of a Leaping Man"; Louis Dienes' "On a Photograph by Eugene Atget" and his illustrated poem "Black and White," originally composed for his own exhibition of photographs, which begins: "The day black and white got a break..."
An often neglected form of art in photography is that of portrait photography. A portrait is the basic rendering of someone’s likeness. A good portrait photographer not only wants to capture the true likeness, but also the personality of the individual. The photographer needs to be proficient not only in the workings and setting of the camera, but also needs to understand form and lighting. Great lighting and positioning can make someone appear at their best form if used correctly. Lighting and camera placement can also aid in correcting defects such as shortening a nose, making someone appear slimmer, etc. In this form of art, portrait photography takes on many roles, and can help create various moods that the individual is seeking.