Instrument of Photography

Whenever you come across graphically detailed photographs like that of natural calamity, starvation, genocide, war etc, you will sense the impact of those pictures deep within your mind or soul. The desperation on the face of a dying child will make you cry, but imagine would capturing such intense moments have been possible if it weren’t for the invention of the camera? A photography device, the camera can capture images, as a single picture or as a sequence of pictures. In a photo camera, you can take single pictures. The camera goes back many years or centuries and derives its name from the Latin word called ‘Camera Obscura’ meaning the dark chamber.

The first photograph was created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. He used a sliding wooden box camera designed and developed by Charles and Vincent Chevalier. But this was not the first discovery of the camera. Johann Zahn had actually built the first camera in 1685 and it was small and portable. It was the technology that was failing and it took almost 150 years for the technology to catch up with the camera.  

Most of the early photographic camera mechanisms were similar to that of Zahn's model. The mechanism relied heavily on the fact that every exposure required the insertion of a sensitized plate. This sensitized plate had to be placed in the front of the viewfinder so that it could record the image that was being shot. The daguerreotype process used copper plates for this purpose while the calotype process recorded the images on paper.

Any camera, in general, consists of an enclosed chamber that has an aperture to help let through the light from one end while a recording surface on the other end captures the light. Most of the cameras have a lens, which is positioned near the aperture so that it can collect the light and then focus the image onto a recording surface.

The optical property of each camera is different from the other, such as the optical property of the SLR is different from that of the regular Point and Shoot. You may have noticed at times that when you try to shoot a picture of the stars from a normal 35mm camera, you never get the picture. In some cameras, the range can easily be adjusted to fit in a long distance photograph. This process is also called focusing the camera. The point and shoot cameras have a fixed focus and they also use a small aperture and the wide angle lens to capture everything within a certain distance like within 10 feet. The cameras for long distance photography are termed as rangefinder cameras or even SLR (single lens reflex) camera. In an SLR, you can composition manually and also the focus. This can be achieved using the objective lens and a movable mirror to project or reflect the picture to a plastic micro-prism screen

Now photography is more technologically enabled and with the arrival of digital camera’s you can only guess, what next?