The word photography originated from two Greek words, photos meaning

light and graphos meaning to write. Before the photographic camera was
invented artists used a different method called camera obscura to
capture images. They stood in a dark room with a small hole through which
light passed through and projected a reversed image of the object on the
outside, onto the opposite wall.

The history of photography first began when Johan Schulze examined

that several silver salts darkened in colour when exposed to light. This
observation was made in 1725 but he did not associate his experiments
towards photography. Near the end of the eighteenth century,
Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce, was the first person to try and fix
camera obscura images using chemicals.

At around 1813, in the early nineteenth century Niepce again began

experimenting and by 1826 he had produced the world’s first picture
camera. He achieved this by coating a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea
and exposing it for 8 hours. He called this new process Heliography which
meant sun drawing. Several years later, Niepce began working with
another Frenchman, Louis Jacques Daguerre, to try and improve the
Heliographic process. Niepce, however, died in 1833 without any
developments in his experimenting.

Dagueer continued his work, however, and by 1839 had invented the first
practical photographic process. He discovered by accident that by
exposing silver plates to iodine vapour and then mercury vapour, an image
would appear. He also found out that the plates could be fixed with salt.
This process was called Daguerreotype but the problem with this process
was that the images were laterally reversed, like a mirror. Later on,
other photographers and inventors reduced exposure times but the main
reason why this process stopped being used was because no copies could
be made.

William Henry Fox-Talbot developed the negative-positive process. He

first began by making contact copies of plants, lace and feathers on silver
nitrate and chloride. In 1835, Talbot made pictures on silver chloride
paper and these were fixed with common salt. These pictures became
some of the first paper negatives. Talbot worked until 1841, when he
improved his process and named it Calotype (a Greek word meaning
beautiful). However, Talbot’s process produced small, rough photographs
and these were critically judged against Daguerre’s attractive, detailed
daguerreotypes. Despite this, however, Talbot’s negative-positive process
was the foundation for modern photography whilst daguerreotypes were a
dead end.

Frederick Scott Archer began a new era in photography in 1852, when he

introduced the wet collodion process. This process produced very
detailed negatives and only required short exposures. The one
disadvantage was that the plate needed to be exposed and developed
before it dried.

In 1871 the largest advance in photography was made when Dr Richard

Leach Maddox introduced the gelatine emulsion dry plate. This meant
that the photographer no longer had to carry his own plates. This brought
in a change in camera design and because of the faster emulsion hand-
held cameras were made possible.

Nonetheless, dry plates were still an inconvenience because they were

very heavy and breakable. In 1861, Alexander Parkes invented Celluloid
and solved this problem. Gradually, the photographic process further
developed until in 1888, Eastman Co. (Kodak) established by George
Eastman, produced a thin nitro cellulose roll film. The Kodak Camera 1
became extremely popular mainly because of the new development and
printing service. This was useful for amateur photographers who only had
to bring the camera to the factory to get their pictures printed, instead
of having to access a darkroom and working with chemicals.

Another highlight in photography was in 1947 when Dr Edwind Land

introduced the Polaroid camera. This camera produced a positive in sixty
seconds and the image from the negative was transferred to the positive
by chemical contact. The biggest disadvantage with this was that the
negatives could not be re-used and only one print was produced.