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A BIT ABOUT THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY:

In Ancient times, Chinese and Greek philosophers described the basic principles of optics and the camera. It had been observed as far back as the 5th century BC that Camera Obscuras, meaning "Darkened Rooms", had been used to form outside images on walls in darkened rooms by sunlight shining through a small hole.

By the middle of 17th century the portable camera obscura had been developed and become in frequent use by artists. It consisted of an outer shell with lenses in the centre of each wall, and an inner shell containing transparent paper for drawing; the artist needed to enter by a trapdoor.

1666: Isaac Newton divides sunlight with a prism and discovers that white light is composed of seven distinct colours.

1750: Canaletto uses the camera obscura as an aid to his painting in Venice

1758: John Dollond developed the achromatic telescope lens; this improved the camera obscura image.

1800: The infrared region of the spectrum of natural light is discovered by Sir Frederick William Herschel (1738-1822). Herschel was the founder of modern astronomy and discovered Uranus and other heavenly bodies.

1801: Thomas Yong suggests the "three colour" idea of light. That there are three primary colours blue, green and red. These three blend together in various combinations to form any other colour in the visible spectrum.

1826: Niepce creates the world’s first permanent image (heliograph) using pewter plates in a camera obscura. It required 8 hours to expose.

1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury to give a single direct positive. They took under 30 minutes to develop and the finished daguerreotype needed to be framed behind glass with the edges sealed to prevent oxidation of the silver. Each image in this process is unique and no copies can be made; this being the main reason that daguerreotypes became obsolete within 20 years of their invention.

1839: Henry Fox Talbot hurriedly prepared and presented papers at the Royal Institution and the Royal Society. Unlike the Daguerre process the image is recorded as a "negative" and had to be printed via a similar process to produce the final "positive". Many positive prints can be made from a single negative.

1843: First advertisement with a photograph made in Philadelphia.

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1844-46: Henry Fox Talbot begins publication of The Pencil of Nature to indicate the range and possibilities of photography.

1847: Niepce De Saint-Victor discovers the use of albumen to bind silver salts on glass base. Albumen process requires 10 minutes exposure. Talbot patents the process in England.

1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Exposure and processing is performed immediately after coating plate. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes; the negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and all from relatively short exposures of a few seconds. The process was published but not patented and Scott Archer died in poverty.

1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade.

1861: Oliver Wendell Holmes invents stereoscope viewer.

1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell tests the three-colour theory of light and demonstrates at the Royal Institute in London the experiment involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same colour filters. When these images are combined a reasonably fully-coloured image is produced. This is the "colour separation" method and is also the first reproducible colour photograph

1869: Henry Peach Robinson publishes Pictorial Effect in Photography, trying to acquaint fellow photographers with aesthetic concepts.

1902: Arthur Korn devises practical phototelegraphy technology (reduction of photographic images to signals that can be transmitted by wire to other locations); Wire-Photos in wide use in Europe by 1910, and transmitted intercontinentally by 1922.

1913: Kinemacolor, the first commercial "natural colour" system for movies is invented

1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.

1923: Harold ("Doc") Edgerton invents the xenon flash lamp and strobe photography.

1932: The first full-colour Technicolor movie, Flowers and Trees, is made by Disney.

1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson , Robert Capa , and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency . The agency developed a

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style of photojournalism that was largely based upon the capability of the Leica 35 mm camera. Magnum is still an exclusive club of illustrious photographers with membership limited to thirty six.

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