History of Cameras



Posted: Monday, April 28, 2008

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http://www.aircraftdata.net

The camera itself and being able to take photos is one of those things we take for granted today. So, it might be interesting to know how it all started. The history of photography and cameras is going back as long as to the 1820's. Nowadays digital photos and storage has become the standard.

Jacques Mand Daguerre (1787-1851) and Nicephore Niepce can be seen as the first inventors of modern photography. They used a chemical component from chalk and silver, 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 films the earliest types of cameras widely accessible at that time, and the next step was to move to manual cameras with film. This negative (i.e the film) would capture the image 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 things like white balance, metering, shutter speed and aperture to get the best possible picture. This, of course, this meant you had to spend a lot of time setting up the shot and in general 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 factors when setting the aperture on your camera. The photographer has bascially to know what numbers will allow more light to enter the lens and quite naturally as well the other way around - to avoid over exposure and blurriness. 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 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.

Next, after the manual cameras, we moved into the automatic ones. The camera became physically lighter and smaller. Moreover the shutter speed and aperture could be programmed into the camera by the settings. 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 hold the button down to focus.

As said earlier, digital cameras are the new era in photography. The technique lets us view the picture we take without the use of negatives and films. Moreover we can send the pictures to friends and quickly enough use our computer printers at home to create prints. Photography has surely enough gone from being just a profession to a technique letting everyone take pictures. Goes without saying the profession will remain. There is still and will always be a need for quality in taking professional grade photographs. However, the fact that most of us nowadays ,thanks to the technology, can take respectable quality photos is of course fantastic.

Maya Hanson is an editor of Computer shops Yellow Pages and currently dreams about becoming a pilot

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