Photography In The Backyard July 6, 2007

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE BACKYARD!

I have discovered that in my Secret walled garden, there used to be a camera obscura. This for me is like finding the first human. What photographic invention and secret lay within my very own secret garden? The County records office held at Carlisle Castle turned up precious little on my patch. So it’s left to play tricks of light on my imagination.

Walking the glorious crumbling wall there is no sign of the ‘camera obscura’, but I am not sure what I am looking for…

The camera obscura (Latin for ‘dark room’) was the ancestor of the modern camera. The camera was actually a large room that would be entered by the user. Light entering a small hole in a darkened room produces an inverted image on the opposite wall. Used initially to view solar eclipses, by the seventeenth century the process was made portable by fitting a lens to one end of a box and using a sheet of glass at the opposite end to view the image. A mirror inserted inside at a 45 degree angle would reverse the image, giving the viewer corrected orientation.

Having read this I aim to rebuild or recreate the camera obscura somewhere within the walled garden. I might use sheets to create an enclosed space. I am not sure of the attraction at looking at the house and valley upside down but it may well be attractive. Perhaps it involves the viewer standing on one’s head, part of the ‘fun’.

THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY is of great relevance to English and French people because they perfected if not invented ‘photography’, partly because they were wealthy countries.

The nice thing about the Camera Obscura is that anyone can make it happen at almost no cost.
Wikipedia takes up the unfolding story of…

Photography as a useable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. However, the picture took eight hours to expose, so he went about trying to find a new process. Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the development of the daguerreotype in 1839.
Meanwhile, Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre’s invention, Talbot refined his process so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people. By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process, which creates negative images. John Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the cyanotype process, now familiar as the “blueprint”. He was the first to use the terms “photography”, “negative” and “positive”. He discovered sodium thiosulphate solution to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it could be used to “fix” pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.
Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made in through the nineteenth century. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.

In actual fact not many people use film today – whereas everyone uses digital. I am still on film and I love the thrill of waiting to get the films back, and having the film (in my case a ‘positive transparency’) in my hand, holding it up to the light, projecting it. I feel in touch with my ancestors Niepce and the secretive Fox Talbot.

Back to the story, because we overlooked colour, which I use…

Color photography was explored beginning in the mid 1800s. Early experiments in color could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first permanent color photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a darkroom or processing plant. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed another technique, with three color plates taken in quick succession.
Practical application of the technique was held back by the very limited color response of early film; however, in the early 1900s, following the work of photo-chemists such as H. W. Vogel, emulsions with adequate sensitivity to green and red light at last became available.
The first color plate, Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the market in 1907. It was based on a ‘screen-plate’ filter made of dyed dots of potato starch, and was the only color film on the market until German Agfa introduced the similar Agfacolor in 1932. In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern (‘integrated tri-pack’) color film, Kodachrome, based on three colored emulsions. This was followed in 1936 by Agfa’s Agfacolor Neue. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack process the color couplers in Agfacolor Neue were integral with the emulsion layers, which greatly simplified the film processing. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based on the Agfacolor Neue technology. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.

Paul Simon with Art Garfunkel wrote a great tribute to Kodachrome… Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. who actually invented it were both accomplished musicians, related to famous musicians.

I am busy playing the piano in the hope that I discover something new in photography.