"Photography" is derived from the Greek words photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw") The word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.
In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet plate negative. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.
Photography advanced considerably when sensitized materials could be coated on plate glass. However, wet plates had to be developed quickly before the emulsion dried. In the field this meant carrying along a portable darkroom.

Tintypes, patented in 1856 by Hamilton Smith, were another medium that heralded the birth of photography. A thin sheet of iron was used to provide a base for light-sensitive material, yielding a positive image.

In 1879, the d ...more

The first photograph was taken approximately 1817 by Nicphore Nipce[1][2] using cameras of his own making; the photographs though were not permanent, and faded away. Later, in 1827, he made permanent images using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris, France. Nipce built on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): that silver salts darken under exposure to light. While this was the introduction of photography, the history of the camera can be traced back much further. Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device dating back to the ancient Chinese[3] and ancient Greeks,[4][5] which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a viewing surface.
Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied the matter. Bacon's notes and drawings, published as Perspectiva in 1267, are partly clouded with theological material describing how the Devil can insinuate himself through the pinhole by magic,[6] an ...more

The forerunner to the camera was the camera obscura.[1] It was a dark chamber (in Latin, a camera obscura, demonstrating the etymology),[2] "consist[ing] of a darkened chamber or box, into which light is admitted through a pinhole (later a convex lens), forming an image of external objects on a surface of paper or glass, etc., placed at the focus of the lens".[2] In the 6th century, Greek mathematician and architect Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.[3] The camera obscura was described by the Arabic scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) in his Book of Optics (10151021).[4] Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied the matter.[5] The actual name of camera obscura was applied by mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler in his Ad Vitellionem paralipomena of 1604. He later added a lens and made the apparatus transportable, in the form of a tent.[6][7] Irish scientist Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke developed a portable camera obscura in the 16 ...more

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