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A Brief History Of Light & Photography: Part 3
The Modern Era:
Kodak, SLRs, Digital Cameras
and the Future of Photography

INTRODUCTION

The development of optics/photography is closely related to astronomy with Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Hubble making significant advances in both fields -- so in this timeline I have also highlighted their contributions to astronomy, a science of light. In addition, I could not help mentioning how often intuition, imagination, accident, spiritual feelings and even poetry played key roles in the scientific understanding of light -- not unlike the kind of inspiration that often guides experimental photography, my particular area of study.

This blog is the third of a series.
See my 1st blog:
A Brief History Of Light & Photography: Part 1:
From Prehistory to the Renaissance
See my 2nd blog:
A Brief History Of Light & Photography: Part 2:
The camera moves and photography is born. From Kepler & Galileo to the 19th century.

PHOTOGRAPHY BECOMES AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

Kodak And The Brownie Camera
Starting in 1878 George Eastman concentrated on making dry plates that were much easier to work with than the former wet plate process that required immediate exposure and development. In 1889 his company, Kodak, produced the first manufactured flexible transparent roll film. In 1900 the company mass produced the Brownie camera. It was easy to use due in part to the simplicity of roll film. Marketed as the everyman camera, it was a device that anyone could get decent snapshots with, as long as they followed Kodak's rather odd directions (see below). Photography then changed from the specialized craft it had been to an activity that was available to the general public.

Quoted From The Brownie Manual
When making snapshots...the subject should be in broad, open sunlight, but the camera must not. The sun should be behind your back or over the shoulder.
NOTE: While these instructions guaranteed a properly exposed photo, the bright sunlight also guaranteed the lighting to be harsh and the people probably squinting because the sun was in their eyes. Kodak promoted the word 'snapshot' to market its message of easy quick photography. And snapshots have been getting a bad rap ever since.

The Cultural Effect Of The Brownie
The Wikipedia article on the Brownie included this fascinating comment: "In 1908, the Austrian architectural critic Joseph August Lux wrote a book called Künstlerische Kodakgeheimnisse (Artistic Secrets of the Kodak) in which he championed the use of the camera for its cultural potential. ...he argued that the accessibility the camera provided for the amateur meant that people could photograph and document their surroundings and thus produce a type of stability in the ebb and flow of the modern world."

Einstein, Albert
== Contributions To an Understanding of Light which Lead to Digital Photography:
In 1905 Albert Einstein published a paper explaining the photoelectric effect; this happened when light shown on certain metals causing electrons to be ejected. His explanation became the basis for digital photography and was an important finding that lead to quantum mechanics. In his paper On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light, he wrote that light acted as both a wave and a particle -- thus agreeing with and contradicting both Maxwell and Newton. When 'light quanta' as he called these wave-packet particles (now called photons) hit certain metals, electrons were ejected based on the intensity and frequency of the light. Einstein won the Nobel prize in part for this explanation which is at the heart of sensors in digital cameras today. See this article for a good explanation.

== Einstein's Contributions to Astronomy:
Einstein redefined the universe as a space-time continuum. And he redefined gravity as a warp in space. In addition he asserted that time itself was relative. In short he completely changed the accepted views of the physical laws of nature.
== About His Insights:
When Einstein was 16 he played an imagination game in which he was chasing a beam of light -- other accounts say that he imagined riding a beam of light -- and that this game he had played with himself had an important role in his development of his theory of relativity. Considered a "thought experiment" it is now seen as one of the greatest imaginative endeavors by any scientist. This was only one of a number of thought experiments, in which he was able to visualize and see a series of events due to the imaginative circumstances that he had placed himself in. Like Newton, it was Einstein's intuition that guided him to the right results, not rigid scientific methodology.

NOTE ABOUT GENIUS: Both Newton and Einstein intuitively settled on light as an area of fruitful study, not knowing where their investigations would take them. While their discoveries required methodical and scientific inquiry, the decision to concentrate on light was an intuitive one. Genius often senses which areas are the most promising. In a modern day example, Stephen Hawking focused on black holes which were not thought to be important and considered just an oddity in the universe. Decades later it was discovered that super massive black holes are at the center of most galaxies and are what, in fact, holds them together.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein

Hubble, Edwin
== Hubble's Critical Use of Photography in Astronomy:
In 1917 Hubble's Ph.D. dissertation, Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae, the furthest light ever recorded on film became the foundation for his later photographic research of the heavens. Up until then it was assumed that the Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Hubble showed that other galaxies existed outside the Milky Way and that the universe was expanding. Eventually this would lead to photographs of thousands of galaxies and the discovery that there were billions of other galaxies. In addition it became clear that the general expansion could be traced back to a single event, the Big Bang.

35MM BECOMES THE STANDARD FORMAT

The SLR: Single Lens Reflex
In 1936 Exakta marketed the first commercial SLR for 35mm. Although the SLR seemed modern, it was actually based on a design from about 250 years earlier -- a 'camera obscura' that used reflecting mirrors had been described in 1676. In addition this design for the camera obscura had been quite common for many years before the advent of the photographic camera.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY BECOMES AVAILABLE

Note About Our Changing Understanding Of The Universe
From Kepler to Galileo to Newton to Hubble, the perceived position of humans in the cosmos was radically diminished. No longer at the center of the universe, instead humans were on a small planet that orbited one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And to make matters worse, the universe contained a 100 billion other galaxies. Indeed we discovered we were just a tiny part of things. Yet the same technology which had revealed this -- and in which photography had played a crucial role -- also gave us unprecedented power over our lives and our world.
See my article: The Long Reach Of Photography: From The Edge Of The Universe To Subatomic Particles

The Effect Of Photography On Contemporary Culture
Whenever I see a story on the local news about a house fire, the family always comments on whether they were able to save the family photo album -- the one thing perhaps that was irreplaceable. Before photography time simply passed with no record. Today photography has transformed our perception of time and created an experience of the passing years which is unique to modern life. Now we can see how we looked last Christmas or a decade ago. And as we age, we are amazed that we ever looked so young. Photography is so precise that a well focused snapshot will show us details that we had forgotten like the pattern on a tie or a raggedy doll in a child's arms. Time is now not something that slips by out of reach, but that we can hold onto just a bit.

THE FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

So Is Digital Photography The End Of Photography's Development?
Far from it -- photography has been changing from the very beginning. While there have been periods of relative stability such as 35mm and the single lens reflex, there have been other periods of rapid change. We are in one of those periods right now. A good example is the Lytro light-field camera that was just introduced this year -- using state of the art technology. Instead of taking a picture, it photographs 'light field data'. A photographer can go back later and decide where to put the focus. And while the advertised advantage of such a camera is today: "shoot now, focus later," I suspect that many other techniques will come about as a result of this technology.
“Light field photography was once only possible with 100 cameras tethered to a supercomputer in a lab. Today it’s accessible to everyone in a camera that’s small and powerful, but incredibly easy to use. Our goal is to forever change the way people take and experience pictures...” said Professor Ng of the Lytro light field camera. (http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2011/1022/Lytro-light-field...)

What Is In The Future?
2050?? We can only speculate, of course, but an obvious leap in technology would be an easily usable, cheap holographic system.

More Ideas For Cameras Of The Future
== As an experimental photographer, my own wish-list includes an LCD monitor that would show me how a picture was 'building' in real time during a long exposure of 4 seconds, for example. Right now the monitor blacks out and I have to take an educated guess.
== Expect that photons, the particles of light, will be better understood at the subatomic and quantum level and that the resulting nanotechnology will again make major changes in photography. For example, today's digital cameras must translate voltage at a photosite (the point where light hits in a camera and that equals one pixel) using an analog to digital conversion. In the future this could be a purely digital task that would count the number of electrons that had been ejected when light hit -- and which could lead to an extended tonal range never before seen in photography.

NOTE: See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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