Joshua Markovics – Designer

History of Photography

The history of photography is the recount of inventions, scientific discoveries and technical improvements that allowed humans to capture for the first time an image on a photosensitive surface, using light and certain chemical elements that react with it.

The history of photography spans from the 19th to the 20th century, but has many antecedents in earlier times. It is one of the most revolutionary technologies that man has developed. Its impact has been felt in the sciences, the arts (even creating a new one) and in historical documentation. It also gave rise to later technologies, such as cinema, among others.

The word photography comes from the Greek words phos ("light") and graphos ("written" or "engraved"), so it is a writing with light or a recording made with light.

Photography Background
The idea of ​​capturing images and preserving them has accompanied the human being since ancient times. It is the foundation of the appearance of painting, sculpture and, later, photography. There were ancient attempts to get an image to be captured automatically, especially using the camera obscura principle, which is the same as that of cameras.

The camera obscura is a closed space or enclosure, totally dark, in which light penetrates through an opening in one of its sides and projects an inverted image of what is happening outside. This principle was known from the time of Aristotle (around 300 years BC) or later from the Arab scholar Alhazén (around 900 AD).

The first publications on the matter in the West appeared from the 15th century, as part of the Scientific Revolution in which philosophers such as Leonardo DaVinci participated. One of his students, Cesare Cesarino was the first to publish these studies in 1521.

Building on this work, scientists such as Giovanni Battista della Porta or Gerolamo Cardano experimented with the camera obscura in 1558. In the 16th century, the 16th century German Johann Zahn developed these principles in a portable wooden apparatus, which was ready to become a camera, having had how to fix the images.

It was not until 1777 that the Swede Carl Wilhelm Scheele published his treatise on silver salts and his reaction to light. Based on these discoveries, several artists such as Giovanni “Canaletto” Canal combined photosensitive salts with the camera obscura and produced some kind of light paintings.

Portrait Photography

Portrait photography is a photographic genre that consists of capturing the personality of a subject, be it an individual or a group, through the use of light, background, poses, technique or composition. The story, the message or the emotion are essential ingredients for any portrait photography.

If you want to discover the types of portrait photography that there are, I will tell you about them below.

WHAT IS THE BEST PHOTO CAMERA FOR PORTRAITS
Although good portraits can be taken with any camera, there is a certain type of camera that will allow us to get a lot out of the subject in front of us. For this, we will need a camera with manual controls: it can be a DSLR or a mirrorless one. These cameras offer the advantage of, first, having an interchangeable lens, something that will allow us to invest later in a good specific lens for portraits (I will tell you more about this later). The second advantage of these cameras is the ability to configure the camera to shoot in manual mode. Being able to adjust the camera in manual mode will give us an incredible advantage when preparing and executing our portrait photography. (To master Manual Mode, I recommend this other mega guide that I have prepared for you).

Within this typology of cameras, any camera is worth it. These are our DSLR camera recommendations to get you started.

BEST LENSES FOR PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY
If you have a camera with an interchangeable lens, your thing is that you gather some money to invest in a good lens for portraits. In terms of lenses there are many options on the market so, so that you do not feel lost, in this article we have prepared a list of the ideal lenses for portrait photos.

The Origin of Photography

The history of photography is truly fabulous and full of ingenuity. At present we all have at least one camera, on the phone or individual, but it has not always been like that. Here, New York City-based photographer Joshua Markovics explains its origin, also who invented photography and how it has evolved.
Origin of photography
The photographic camera is the application of optics to chemistry. Its remote precedent is the camera obscura, a phenomenon known to the Chinese 2,500 years ago and which took shape in the 16th century.
At the end of the Middle Ages, the Arab sage Al-hazen observed eclipses of the sun through a camera obscura that Leonardo da Vinci describes in the Renaissance: “If a ray of sunlight penetrates into a camera obscura through a hole it will project an inverted image on the opposite side ”.
To invent the photographic camera and obtain an image, it was enough to replace that hole with a lens. This was done by the Italian Aniello Barbaro in 1568, introducing a converging lens to improve the sharpness of the image.
Only one thing was missing, and that was to find a method to be able to fix the image in a natural way, without resorting to the pencil or the brush.
The inverted and reduced reproduction of an image through a converging lens is a phenomenon called camera obscura, a name that refers to a room painted black with a hole that lets through the ray of light that gives rise to an inverted image on the wall. inside opposite
In this way, by placing a paper or any other support between the wall and the light beam, it is possible to draw the exposed image on it.
This procedure was used by artists to obtain images according to the Neapolitan physicist Giambattista della Porta in his Magia naturalis (1569), the first to use the camera obscura for that purpose.
To reproduce the image a sensitive medium was necessary, and this element was accidentally found in the early 18th century. When the German Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that a bottle of silver salts mixed with chalk and nitric acid takes a purple coloration in the places exposed to light, while leaving the unexposed areas blank.
This phenomenon interested another scholar, Carl W. Scheele, who observed how the bands of the solar spectrum do not oxidize silver nitrate with the same speed; rather, they do it gradually, observations that were forgotten.
If the world of chemistry had been as advanced as that of optics, the photographic camera would have been invented in 1685 by Johann Zahn or Athanase Kircher, manufacturers of portable dark cameras.
In 1801 and 1802, Johann W. Ritter and Thomas Wedgwood unsuccessfully attempted to obtain an image on sensitive paper in a camera obscura. Wedgwood wanted to copy his father's pottery drawings by placing a silver nitrate screen at the back of the camera obscura.
In 1802, Humphrey Day published the experiment in the Journal of the Royal Institution, in London. The pale, fleeting images of Wedgwood were, however, the first photographs in history.
Who Invented Photography
As we understand it today, photography was invented by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce who captured in 1816, an image on paper impregnated with silver chloride at the bottom of a camera obscura: it was the first negative, but so ephemeral that it was of little use.
This amateur French lithographer, to extend the duration of the image, resorted to Judean bitumen, which hardens and turns white if light hits it, and on a plate coated with this substance, Niepce reproduced some engravings in 1822: the ancestors of the Photography.
In 1826 Niepce captured, after eight hours of exposure on a plate coated with Judean bitumen, the first positive of an image. Photography as we know it had just been born.