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  Photography

One of the most eye-catching attributes of any publication is the photograph that enhance the magazine, pamphlet, newspaper or whatever…Photography, like so much other technology has advanced exponentially over the past decades. We hope to give you just a short overview of how it started and where it is headed.

Photography is the process of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium such as film, or an electronic sensor.  This takes place during a timed exposure through a device (known as a camera) that stores the information chemically or electronically.

The word comes from Greek words that mean light, stylus, paintbrush or drawing and together came to mean drawing with light.  The creations of photography are called negatives and photographs or photos.

The camera is the image forming device and the film or the silicon electronic image sensor is the medium.  The recording medium can be the actual film or a digital electronic or magnetic memory.

Photography has been utilized by scientists and artists since its inception.  Military, police, and security use this medium for surveillance and data storage.  Nearly everyone in our modern society has a means of taking photographs to preserve memories and capture special moments & occasions. 

Commercial advertising makes use of photography a great deal and has contributed to its development by consistently demanding more and better specialty products.

Photography as a usable process dates back to the early 1800’s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photo was produced in 1825, but because the photos took so long to expose, Nicephore Niepce, a French inventor began working with Louis Daguerre and silver compounds.  This work culminated in 1837 with the development of the daguerreotype.

Daguerre took the first ever picture of a person in 1839.   France paid Daguerre a pension for his formula in exchange for the promise that he would announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did in 1839.

Hercules Florence had created a very similar process in 1832 naming it Photographie and William Fox Talbot had discovered another means to fix a silver process image. John Herschel made many contributions to the new methods and invented what we now know as blueprints.  He was the first to use “Photography”, “negative” and “positive”.  He also discovered the chemical solution that would enhance longetivity and told Talbot & Daguerre that it could be used to “fix” pictures to make them permanent.  He also made the first glass negative in 1839.

 In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer published his findings on the wet plate collodion process. This became the most widely used process for nearly 30 years when the dry plate was introduced.  There are three subsets to the Collodion process:  the positive image on glass, the positive image on metal and the negative which was printed on Albumen or Salt paper.

 Many strides in glass plates and printing were made in the nineteenth century.  George Eastman in 1884 developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates leading to the technology used by film cameras today.

In 1908 Gabriel Lippmann won the Nobel Laureate in Physics for his means of reproducing colours photographically.

While you might expect that newspapers utilize photography in every edition we print from acutual photos to advertising content  what you may not be aware of, is that a similar process, only on a much larger scale, is how we created your newspaper here at the Sun-Gazette.  It has only been in the past two years that we have eliminated the film part of our printing process, but we still utilize the Ferrotype or Tintype method of placing the positive image on a metal plate in order to print your newspaper.