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Learn the history of Photography

Being able to take photos is somesthing we take for granted as of today. But have you ever wondered how photography and cameras were invented. The technique of taking photos is going back as long as to the 1820's. Nowadays digital photos and storage has become the standard.

Jacques Mandé Daguerre and Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) were the first inventors of modern photography. They successfully experimented with a chemical component from silver and chalk, which , when exposed to light, darkens. This type of technology used a glass negative to cement the picture.

Maybe you have seen in some old cowboy/western movies the earliest types of cameras available at that time, and the next step was to move to manual cameras with film. This film or negative worked by capture the picture on a roll to be developed in a dark room which is to prevent over exposure. These manual cameras used a theory of setting up shots. In short they were really hard to handle. You had to understand aperture, shutter speed, white balance, and metering to obtain the best possible picture. As you can understand this meant you spent a lot of time setting up the shot and probably had to be a professional.

Now, to furher explain, aperture is the amount of light the lens will let in. Depth and focusing of field are also important when setting the aperture on your camera. The photographer has bascially to know what numbers will allow more light to enter the lens and of course as well the converse - to avoid blurriness and over exposure. Shutter speed can be explained as the amount of time a lens is open for the picture. When taking pictures in a darkened room without flash you may have found that your camera takes a while to actually imprint the picture on the negative. This is simply because the light is dim and the shutter in turn must correct for the lack of light.

came the the automatic ones. The camera became physically lighter. Another improvement was that the aperture and shutter speed could be programmed into the camera by the settings. Now also ISO became important. ISO is the actual film speed. Instead of taking many minutes to set up a shot you now just had to pick the correct setting and then hold the button down to focus.

As said in the beginning, digital cameras are the new era in photography. The technique lets us view the picture we take without the use of negatives and films. And as you know we can send the pictures to people we know and quickly enough use our computer printers at home to create prints. Photography has surely enough evolved from being just a profession to a technique letting everyone take pictures. Goes without saying the profession will remain. There is still a need for quality in taking professional grade photographs. However, the fact that all of us nowadays ,thanks to the technology, are able to take good quality pictures is of course fantastic.