Results: The History of News and Communication * Part Sixteen * The Invention of Photography - Before photography was created, people had figured out the basic principles of lenses and the camera. They could project the image on the wall or piece of paper,

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. Light coming in through a tiny hole transforms and creates an image on the surface that it meets, like the wall of the box. The image is flipped and upside down, however, which is why modern analogue cameras have made use of mirrors .https://youtu.be/JoxGEymA8ro You must watch the link on You Tube ** Were you aware of Camera Obscura prior to this survey?

In the mid 16th century, Giovanni Battista della Porta, an Italian scholar, wrote an essay on how to use camera obscura to make 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 process of using camera obscura looked very strange and frightening for the people at those times. Giovanni Battista had to drop the idea after he was arrested and prosecuted on a charge of sorcery. Are you surprised that Giovanni was arrested for Camera Obscura?

The first photo picture—as we know it—was taken in 1825 by a French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It records a view from the window at Le Gras. The exposure had to last for eight hours, so the sun in the picture had time to move from east to west appearing to shine on both sides of the building in the picture. Niepce came up with the idea of using a petroleum derivative called "Bitumen of Judea" to record the camera's projection. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light, and the unhardened material could then be washed away. The metal plate, which was used by Niepce, was then polished, rendering a negative image that could be coated with ink to produce a print. One of the problems with this method was that the metal plate was heavy, expensive to produce, and took a lot of time to polish. Were you aware that the first photographic processes did not involve the use of a negative?

As a scientist, Fox Talbot knew that some chemicals are sensitive to light. And like a few other of his contemporaries, he began to look for a way to use these light-sensitive chemicals to "fix" the image from his camera obscura. He decided to try impregnating paper with chemicals, so that the image could be automatically reproduced on the paper. His methods were very popular with Botanists. Were you aware of Mr. Fox Talbot prior to this survey?

The First successful form of photography, named for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre of France, who invented the technique in collaboration with Nicéphore Niépce in the 1830s. Daguerre and Niépce found that if a copper plate coated with silver iodide was exposed to light in a camera, then fumed with mercury vapour and fixed (made permanent) by a solution of common salt, a permanent image would be formed. A great number of daguerreotypes, especially portraits, were made in the mid-19th century. Have you heard of daguerreotype prior to this survey?

In 1839, Sir John Herschel came up with a way of making the first glass negative. The same year he coined the term photography, deriving from the Greek "fos" meaning light and "grafo"—to write. Even though the process became easier and the result was better, it was still a long time until photography was publicly recognized. Were you aware this process was the origin of Blueprints?