PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE LENSES OF TIME

While clicking a picture with your trendy smart phone or DSLR, have you ever wondered how far we have come? From clicking blurry pictures with gigantic camera box to capturing high-res images with a sleek device that slips right into our pockets! Undoubtedly, photography has undergone major revolution in a span of two hundred years. Ahead of World Photography Day on August 19, we thought of turning back the pages of history and looking at the giants on whose shoulders we stand on today. Let’s dive into the evolution and revolution of photography and imaging technology!

- NITYAPRIYA KALIYATH

The Legacy of the First Camera

The concept of photography has been around for a long time. The idea of photography started with the camera obscura, which literally translates to “dark chamber” in Latin. So what exactly is a camera obscura? In the simplest of its forms, a camera obscura is a dark room with a small hole in one of the walls. When it’s bright outside, light enters through the hole and projects an upside-down image of the outside world on the opposite wall of the camera.

The earliest known written record of camera obscura was offered in 400BC by the Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu. He observed that light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted image on the opposite wall of the darkroom.

Several scientists and philosophers, including Aristotle, experimented with light passing through a hole. However, it wasn’t until the 11th century that a viewing screen was used to project the image. The credit for inventing the camera obscura, as well as the pinhole camera, goes to Ibn al-Haytham (also known as Alhazen) – an Iraqi scientist.

Later on, in the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci suggested that the human eye is like a camera obscura. However, an Italian scholar named Giambattista Della Porta was the first person to not just describe camera obscura, but also make improvements to it. He added a concave lens near where light enters the pinhole.