Module 1 - Technology through History

After gaining a free passes to MOTAT and learn more about history of the technology in class, I head to MOTAT and observe the technologies available in MOTAT. I've visited an exhibition room of camera and it caught my interest. Camera is as amazing as it captures pictures which could be memories of certain people or beautiful scenes of a place. Visiting MOTAT gives me the opportunity to understand the history of the camera.Since 1848, photographers have been started to work in New Zealand and photography was difficult and expensive until the 1880s as the equipment is bulky and delicate. As we know, New Zealand has a lot of stunning scenery and photography is one of the way to enable people to capture and share the beauty of mother nature around the world.

Some introduction poster of the camera in MOTAT.

In the 1790s Thomas Wedwood, son of Josiah Wedgwood a famous potter began experimenting material that able to copy visible image into fixed media such as using treated paper with heat and light to develop images. These images could only be preserved in dark room and will faded with time pass by.

The First Photograph

Earliest known photography is from a metal plate in 1825 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce with the heliographic process which uses bitumen as a coating on metal that will harden when exposes to light. The first camera was invented in the 18th century which is called Camera Obscura which is a device dated back to the ancient Chinese and ancient Greek by a Chinese philosopher name Mo Di and Greek mathematicians Aristolte and Euclid. Camera Obscura uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside upside-down on to the viewing area. Camera Obscura in Latin mean "dark room" where the dark room inside the camera allows a small light through the lens or the pin hole in front of the camera to capture the image.

http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/stilphotography.htm

http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/01824/

An artist using a portable Camera Obscura to trace images projected onto the ground glass. 

After the camera being publicly exhibited in 1898, the photography is lost in obscurity until Helmut Gernsheim, a photo-historian uncovered the whereabouts in 1952.

Daguerreotype

Niece partner with a French artist Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in 1829. Daguerre continue experiment and develop the photographic plates after Niepce pass away 1833 and discovered that an image can be made permanently by immersing in salt while reduced the exposure time from eight hours to half an hour. His discoveries soon become popular and the process is named Daguerreotype and is hard to obtained in New Zealand because it took 6 months for the order to arrive in England and require up to a year to be delivered to New Zealand.

Daguerreotype miniature of a young man circa 1830s. (MOTAT collectiom)

Paper Base - the Calotype

William Henry Fox Talbot travelled widely with a portable camera obscura and experimented with silver salts which lead to his success in producing fixed images on paper in 1834 by placing a negative paper on a sensitised steel sheet and exposing it to the light shine through the negative. William Henry Fox Talbot proclaim his invention in 1839 where he improved the process by adding Garlic acid to increase the light sensitivity of the paper. This process is named Calotype which was pioneered to most of the photographic process in 19th and 20th centuries.

Oldest Photographic Negative by Fox Talbot. (A picture of a window  in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey)

Plate Cameras - J Lancaster & Sons

In early time's camera type display in MOTAT.

The picture above shows the example of dry plate cameras made by J Lancaster & Sons which is famous in making wooden plate cameras in Birmingham. The dry plate of the cameras has many size depending on the camera itself which could range from 3.5cm x 4cm to 16.5cm x 21.5cm.The Le Meritoire 1/4 plate camera which is on the right of the shelf from the picture above is made for amateur photographers where the body of the camera is attaches to a separate baseboard while the Lancaster Instantograph 1/4 plate robust camera is used by advance amateur photographers.

Le Meritoire 1/4 plate folding camera, circa 1884, with a close up of the Auckland retailer's label on the camera (left), and the Lancaster Instantograph 1/4 plate model, circa 1895 (right).

Tint Types

The tint types of photography has been invented by Hamilton Smith in 1856 where a thin sheet of iron was used to provide a base for light-sensitive material that is yielding a positive image. According to (about.com), tint types are a variation of the collodion wet plate process. The emulsion is painted onto a japanned (varnished) iron plate, which is exposed in the camera. The low cost and durability of tint types, coupled with the growing number of travelling photographers, enhanced the tint type’s popularity.
http://inventors.about.com/od/weirdmuseums/ig/Illustrated-History-Photograph/Tintypes-75th-Ohio-Infantry.htm

A four lens tint type camera in mid 1850s.

Image retrieve from http://www.civilwar.si.edu/domestic_life_images/tintype_camera.jpg

Dry Plate Negative & Hand-held Camera

In 1879, the dry plate was invented by Eastman Kodak with a glass negative plate with a dried gelatin emulsion to allow the plates to dry. Dry plates could be stored for a period of time and enable the Photographers to no longer needed portable darkrooms and could now hire technicians to develop their photographs. Dry processes absorbed light quickly and so rapidly that the hand-held camera was now possible.

http://www.streetarticles.com/personal-tech/a-short-history-of-the-camera-the-dry-plate-makes-handheld-cameras-possible

Hand-held Camera Dry Plate Negative by Kodak

Image retrieve from http://www.bookdrum.com/images/books/84818_o.jpg

Flexible Roll Film

George Eastman invented the flexible base film and is unbreakable. Furthermore, the flexible film can be rolled and store in a small capsule. Emulsions coated on a cellulose nitrate film base made the mass-produced box camera a reality. Nitrocellulose was used to make the first flexible and transparent film. The process of using the Nitrocellulose was developed by the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin in 1887 and is introduced by the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1889. The film's ease of use combined with intense marketing by Eastman-Kodak made photography increasingly accessible to amateurs.

Colour Photography

In the early 1940s, commercially viable colour films (except Kodachrome, introduced in 1935) were brought to the market. These films used the modern technology of dye-coupled colours in which a chemical process connects the three dye layers together to create an apparent colour image.

35mm Camera

As early as 1905, Oskar Barnack had the idea of reducing the format of film negatives and then enlarging the photographs after they had been exposed. As development manager at Leica, he was able to put his theory into practice. He took an instrument for taking exposure samples for cinema film and turned it into the world's first 35 mm camera: the 'Ur-Leica'. Ur-Leica produce 24X36mm image size and 35mm flim size.

Polaroid or Instant Camera

Edwin Herbert Land invented the Polaroid or Instant Camera in 1948. Land was the American inventor and physicist whose one-step process for developing and printing photos created instant photography. The first Polaroid camera was sold to the public in November, 1948.

The evolution of the Polaroid Camera.

Image Retrieved from http://timesceneinvestigator.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/polaroid-history-cameras.jpg

Digital Camera

The digital camera is being introduced in 1984 by Canon. Later on Kodak scientist invented world first mega pixel sensor in 1986 which capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5X7 inch digital photo-quality print. In 1990, Kodak developed the Photo CD system and proposed "the first worldwide standard for defining colour in the digital environment of computers and computer peripherals.

Social Impact

Camera or photography has been giving a lot of impacts towards the society especially from the development of the first camera obscura until current latest Digital Camera. The 35mm wide lens camera and  APS compact camera has been reduced in the market as a lot of secondhand camera that been refurbished has been offer in chaper price. "One company stopped production of a new film camera even though it would later in the year receive an award for "camera of the year." (Hub Pages, 2010 retrieve from http://haroldgspence.hubpages.com/hub/The-Social-Impact-of-Digital-Photography).

The stop production of colour film and paper by big companies causes a lot of employed people lost their job as employed people have been reduce by 1/3 over the last 20 years. Whether these jobs has been compensated by the digital industry are still unknown. However, technological improvement of the camera changed how people view at the photo taken by the camera. Prior to 1970s, most people in US view the photos through the projector and colour prints with the increase of the use of internet and e-mail. Lower-cost  computer and digital photography increase the number of digitally formatted photographs which can be edited and be view on cellphones and laptops as well. However, people still make and look at prints of the photo. In addition to lowered sales of film and film cameras has been the decreased use of film processing, and many department stores are switching to the development of digital film as a means to keep up with the trends. Sales of film, film cameras, and the development of film has seen a dramatic decrease and many stores that used to sell these items no longer offer them where film in photography is rare and consider as historical items.