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A darkroom is used to process photographic film , make prints and carry out other associated tasks. It is a room that can be made completely dark to allow the processing of light -sensitive photographic materials, including film and photographic paper . Various equipment is used in the darkroom, including an enlarger , baths containing chemicals, and running water.

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92-525: Darkrooms have been used since the inception of photography in the early 19th century. Darkrooms have many various manifestations, from the elaborate space used by Ansel Adams to a retooled ambulance wagon used by Timothy H. O'Sullivan . From the initial development of the film to the creation of prints, the darkroom process allows complete control over the medium. Due to the popularity of color photography and complexity of processing color film ( see C-41 process ) and printing color photographs and also to

184-480: A British inventor, William Fox Talbot , had succeeded in making crude but reasonably light-fast silver images on paper as early as 1834 but had kept his work secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention in January 1839, Talbot published his hitherto secret method and set about improving on it. At first, like other pre-daguerreotype processes, Talbot's paper-based photography typically required hours-long exposures in

276-553: A diaphragm in 1566. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze used a light-sensitive slurry to capture images of cut-out letters on a bottle and on that basis many German sources and some international ones credit Schulze as the inventor of photography. The fiction book Giphantie , published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche , described what can be interpreted as photography. In June 1802, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made

368-463: A graph or function or an imaginary entity. For a mental image to be understood outside of an individual's mind, however, there must be a way of conveying that mental image through the words or visual productions of the subject. The broader sense of the word 'image' also encompasses any two-dimensional figure, such as a map , graph , pie chart , painting , or banner . In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing ,

460-433: A photographic fixer . The print is then washed to remove the processing chemicals and dried. There are a variety of other, additional steps a photographer may take, such as toning. Photography This is an accepted version of this page Photography is the art , application, and practice of creating images by recording light , either electronically by means of an image sensor , or chemically by means of

552-476: A "cult" value as an example of artistic beauty. Following years of various reproductions of the painting, the portrait's "cult" status has little to do with its original subject or the artistry. It has become famous for being famous, while at the same time, its recognizability has made it a subject to be copied, manipulated, satirized, or otherwise altered in forms ranging from Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q . to Andy Warhol 's multiple silk-screened reproductions of

644-436: A (usually) male viewer. The documentary film scholar Bill Nichols has also studied how apparently "objective" photographs and films still encode assumptions about their subjects. Images perpetuated in public education, media, and popular culture have a profound impact on the formation of such mental images: What makes them so powerful is that they circumvent the faculties of the conscious mind but, instead, directly target

736-465: A 3-dimensional object with less effort; the advent and development of " 3-D printing " has expanded that capability. "Moving" two-dimensional images are actually illusions of movement perceived when still images are displayed in sequence, each image lasting less, and sometimes much less, than a fraction of a second. The traditional standard for the display of individual frames by a motion picture projector has been 24 frames per second (FPS) since at least

828-462: A book or handbag or pocket watch (the Ticka camera) or even worn hidden behind an Ascot necktie with a tie pin that was really the lens. Image An image is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional , such as a drawing , painting , or photograph , or three-dimensional , such as a carving or sculpture . Images may be displayed through other media, including a projection on

920-413: A camera obscura as well as the first true pinhole camera . The invention of the camera has been traced back to the work of Ibn al-Haytham. While the effects of a single light passing through a pinhole had been described earlier, Ibn al-Haytham gave the first correct analysis of the camera obscura, including the first geometrical and quantitative descriptions of the phenomenon, and was the first to use

1012-484: A complex processing procedure. Agfa's similarly structured Agfacolor Neu was introduced in 1936. Unlike Kodachrome, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neu were incorporated into the emulsion layers during manufacture, which greatly simplified the processing. Currently, available color films still employ a multi-layer emulsion and the same principles, most closely resembling Agfa's product. Instant color film , used in

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1104-451: A degree of image post-processing that is comparatively difficult in film-based photography and permits different communicative potentials and applications. Digital photography dominates the 21st century. More than 99% of photographs taken around the world are through digital cameras, increasingly through smartphones. A large variety of photographic techniques and media are used in the process of capturing images for photography. These include

1196-451: A form of record-keeping; as an element of spiritual, religious, or magical practice; or even as a form of communication. Early writing systems , including hieroglyphics , ideographic writing, and even the Roman alphabet , owe their origins in some respects to pictorial representations. Images of any type may convey different meanings and sensations for individual viewers, regardless of whether

1288-443: A light-sensitive material such as photographic film . It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photolithography ), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production , recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication . A person who captures or takes photographs is called a photographer . Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into

1380-546: A monochrome image from one shot in color. Color photography was explored beginning in the 1840s. Early experiments in color required extremely long exposures (hours or days for camera images) and could not "fix" the photograph to prevent the color from quickly fading when exposed to white light. The first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. The foundation of virtually all practical color processes, Maxwell's idea

1472-401: A physiological effect of light impressions remaining on the retina of the eye for very brief periods. Even though the term is still sometimes used in popular discussions of movies, it is not a scientifically valid explanation. Other terms emphasize the complex cognitive operations of the brain and the human visual system. " Flicker fusion ", the " phi phenomenon ", and " beta movement " are among

1564-403: A real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure . With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel , which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image , which is later chemically "developed" into

1656-429: A real-world scene, as formed in a camera obscura by a lens ). Because Niépce's camera photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days), he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. In partnership with Louis Daguerre , he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced visually superior results and replaced

1748-418: A roll of film by making a contact print of their negatives to use as a quick reference to decide which images to enlarge. Some large format photographers, such as Edward Weston , make only contact prints of their large (4x5", 5x7", 8x10" or larger) negatives. The paper that has been exposed is processed, first by immersion in a photographic developer , halting development with a stop bath , and fixing in

1840-437: A screen in a dark room so that an image from one side of a hole in the surface could be projected onto a screen on the other side. He also first understood the relationship between the focal point and the pinhole, and performed early experiments with afterimages , laying the foundations for the invention of photography in the 19th century. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camerae obscurae that are formed by dark caves on

1932-418: A slide projector, that projects light through the image of a negative onto a base, finely controls the focus, intensity and duration of light, is used for printmaking. A sheet of photographic paper is exposed to the light coming through the negative, resulting in a positive version of the image on the paper. When making black-and-white prints, a safelight is commonly used to illuminate the work area. Since

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2024-441: A special camera which yielded a unique finished color print only a minute or two after the exposure, was introduced by Polaroid in 1963. Color photography may form images as positive transparencies, which can be used in a slide projector , or as color negatives intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography owing to

2116-412: A surface, activation of electronic signals, or digital displays ; they can also be reproduced through mechanical means, such as photography , printmaking , or photocopying . Images can also be animated through digital or physical processes. In the context of signal processing , an image is a distributed amplitude of color(s). In optics , the term "image" (or "optical image") refers specifically to

2208-497: A viewing screen or paper. The birth of photography was then concerned with inventing means to capture and keep the image produced by the camera obscura. Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate , and Georg Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered silver chloride , and the techniques described in Ibn al-Haytham 's Book of Optics are capable of producing primitive photographs using medieval materials. Daniele Barbaro described

2300-646: A visible image, either negative or positive , depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing . A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print , either by using an enlarger or by contact printing . The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots φωτός ( phōtós ), genitive of φῶς ( phōs ), "light" and γραφή ( graphé ) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light". Several people may have coined

2392-402: Is a single static image. This phrase is used in photography, visual media , and the computer industry to emphasize that one is not talking about movies, or in very precise or pedantic technical writing such as a standard . A moving image is typically a movie ( film ) or video , including digital video . It could also be an animated display , such as a zoetrope . A still frame

2484-404: Is a still image derived from one frame of a moving one. In contrast, a film still is a photograph taken on the set of a movie or television program during production, used for promotional purposes. In image processing , a picture function is a mathematical representation of a two-dimensional image as a function of two spatial variables . The function f(x,y) describes the intensity of

2576-452: Is also credited with coining the word, independent of Talbot, in 1839. The inventors Nicéphore Niépce , Talbot, and Louis Daguerre seem not to have known or used the word "photography", but referred to their processes as "Heliography" (Niépce), "Photogenic Drawing"/"Talbotype"/"Calotype" (Talbot), and "Daguerreotype" (Daguerre). Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, relating to seeing an image and capturing

2668-399: Is kept dark while the object to be photographed is in another room where it is properly illuminated. This was common for reproduction photography of flat copy when large film negatives were used (see Process camera ). As soon as photographic materials became "fast" (sensitive) enough for taking candid or surreptitious pictures, small "detective" cameras were made, some actually disguised as

2760-401: Is still an image, even though it does not fully use the visual system's capabilities. On the other hand, some processes can be used to create visual representations of objects that are otherwise inaccessible to the human visual system. These include microscopy for the magnification of minute objects, telescopes that can observe objects at great distances, X-rays that can visually represent

2852-399: Is stored electronically, but can be reproduced on a paper. The camera (or ' camera obscura ') is a dark room or chamber from which, as far as possible, all light is excluded except the light that forms the image. It was discovered and used in the 16th century by painters. The subject being photographed, however, must be illuminated. Cameras can range from small to very large, a whole room that

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2944-401: Is where the photographer determines two separate exposure times using two separate filters (typically a 0 or 00, and a 5) to create a single print. This method allows the photographer to achieve a broad tonal range, with detailed highlights and rich blacks. After exposure, the photographic printing paper (which still appears blank) is ready to be processed. Photographers generally begin printing

3036-632: The Frauenkirche and other buildings in Munich, then taking another picture of the negative to get a positive , the actual black and white reproduction of a view on the object. The pictures produced were round with a diameter of 4 cm, the method was later named the "Steinheil method". In France, Hippolyte Bayard invented his own process for producing direct positive paper prints and claimed to have invented photography earlier than Daguerre or Talbot. British chemist John Herschel made many contributions to

3128-436: The daguerreotype process. The essential elements—a silver-plated surface sensitized by iodine vapor, developed by mercury vapor, and "fixed" with hot saturated salt water—were in place in 1837. The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of hours. Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on

3220-403: The 21st century. Hurter and Driffield began pioneering work on the light sensitivity of photographic emulsions in 1876. Their work enabled the first quantitative measure of film speed to be devised. The first flexible photographic roll film was marketed by George Eastman , founder of Kodak in 1885, but this original "film" was actually a coating on a paper base. As part of the processing,

3312-478: The Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin argues that the mechanical reproduction of images, which had accelerated through photographic processes in the previous one hundred years or so, inevitably degrades the "authenticity" or quasi-religious "aura" of the original object. One example is Leonardo da Vinci 's Mona Lisa , originally painted as a portrait, but much later, with its display as an art object, it developed

3404-457: The Greek philosopher Plato described our apparent reality as a copy of a higher order of universal forms . As copies of a higher reality, the things we perceive in the world, tangible or abstract, are inevitably imperfect. Book 7 of The Republic offers Plato's " Allegory of the Cave ," where ordinary human life is compared to being a prisoner in a darkened cave who believes that shadows projected onto

3496-505: The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908. Glass plates were the medium for most original camera photography from the late 1850s until the general introduction of flexible plastic films during the 1890s. Although the convenience of the film greatly popularized amateur photography, early films were somewhat more expensive and of markedly lower optical quality than their glass plate equivalents, and until

3588-403: The advantages of being considerably tougher, slightly more transparent, and cheaper. The changeover was not completed for X-ray films until 1933, and although safety film was always used for 16 mm and 8 mm home movies, nitrate film remained standard for theatrical 35 mm motion pictures until it was finally discontinued in 1951. Films remained the dominant form of photography until

3680-562: The art of painting, or the graphic arts (such as lithography or etching ). Additionally, images can be rendered automatically through printing , computer graphics technology, or a combination of both methods. A two-dimensional image does not need to use the entire visual system to be a visual representation. An example of this is a grayscale ("black and white") image, which uses the visual system's sensitivity to brightness across all wavelengths without taking into account different colors. A black-and-white visual representation of something

3772-499: The bitumen with a more light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were still required. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy. Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre then redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive silver halides , which Niépce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent. Daguerre's efforts culminated in what would later be named

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3864-402: The busy boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the several-minutes-long exposure to be visible. The existence of Daguerre's process was publicly announced, without details, on 7 January 1839. The news created an international sensation. France soon agreed to pay Daguerre a pension in exchange for the right to present his invention to

3956-458: The camera and lens to "expose" the light recording material to the required amount of light to form a " latent image " (on plate or film) or RAW file (in digital cameras) which, after appropriate processing, is converted to a usable image. Digital cameras use an electronic image sensor based on light-sensitive electronics such as charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The resulting digital image

4048-416: The camera, but in 1840 he created the calotype process, which used the chemical development of a latent image to greatly reduce the exposure needed and compete with the daguerreotype. In both its original and calotype forms, Talbot's process, unlike Daguerre's, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies; this is the basis of most modern chemical photography up to

4140-418: The camera; dualphotography; full-spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared media; light field photography; and other imaging techniques. The camera is the image-forming device, and a photographic plate , photographic film or a silicon electronic image sensor is the capture medium. The respective recording medium can be the plate or film itself, or a digital magnetic or electronic memory. Photographers control

4232-498: The cave's wall comprise actual reality. Since art is itself an imitation, it is a copy of that copy and all the more imperfect. Artistic images, then, not only misdirect human reason away from understanding the higher forms of true reality, but in imitating the bad behaviors of humans in depictions of the gods, they can corrupt individuals and society. Echoes of such criticism have persisted across time, accelerating as image-making technologies have developed and expanded immensely since

4324-399: The commercial introduction of "talking pictures" in the late 1920s, which necessitated a standard for synchronizing images and sounds. Even in electronic formats such as television and digital image displays, the apparent "motion" is actually the result of many individual lines giving the impression of continuous movement. This phenomenon has often been described as " persistence of vision ":

4416-590: The early 21st century when advances in digital photography drew consumers to digital formats. Although modern photography is dominated by digital users, film continues to be used by enthusiasts and professional photographers. The distinctive "look" of film based photographs compared to digital images is likely due to a combination of factors, including (1) differences in spectral and tonal sensitivity (S-shaped density-to-exposure (H&D curve) with film vs. linear response curve for digital CCD sensors), (2) resolution, and (3) continuity of tone. Originally, all photography

4508-402: The edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. It is a box with a small hole in one side, which allows specific light rays to enter, projecting an inverted image onto

4600-587: The first glass negative in late 1839. In the March 1851 issue of The Chemist , Frederick Scott Archer published his wet plate collodion process . It became the most widely used photographic medium until the gelatin dry plate, introduced in the 1870s, eventually replaced it. There are three subsets to the collodion process; the Ambrotype (a positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (a positive image on metal) and

4692-471: The first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance. He used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate . Although he succeeded in capturing the shadows of objects placed on the surface in direct sunlight, and even made shadow copies of paintings on glass, it was reported in 1802 that "the images formed by means of a camera obscura have been found too faint to produce, in any moderate time, an effect upon

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4784-547: The first modern "integral tripack" (or "monopack") color film, was introduced by Kodak in 1935. It captured the three color components in a multi-layer emulsion . One layer was sensitized to record the red-dominated part of the spectrum , another layer recorded only the green part and a third recorded only the blue. Without special film processing , the result would simply be three superimposed black-and-white images, but complementary cyan, magenta, and yellow dye images were created in those layers by adding color couplers during

4876-488: The form of idols . In recent years, militant extremist groups such as the Taliban and ISIS have destroyed centuries-old artifacts, especially those associated with other religions. Virtually all cultures have produced images and applied different meanings or applications to them. The loss of knowledge about the context and connection of an image to its object is likely to result in different perceptions and interpretations of

4968-440: The glass negative, which was used to make positive prints on albumen or salted paper. Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made during the rest of the 19th century. In 1891, Gabriel Lippmann introduced a process for making natural-color photographs based on the optical phenomenon of the interference of light waves. His scientifically elegant and important but ultimately impractical invention earned him

5060-461: The illusion of depth in an otherwise "flat" image, but "3-D photography" ( stereoscopy ) or " 3-D film " are optical illusions that require special devices such as eyeglasses to create the illusion of depth. Copies of 3-dimensional images have traditionally had to be crafted one at a time, usually by an individual or team of artisans . In the modern age, the development of plastics and other technologies made it possible to create multiple copies of

5152-529: The image and even of the original object itself. Through human history, one dominant form of imagery has been in relation to religion and spirituality. Such images, whether in the form of idols that are objects of worship or that represent some other spiritual state or quality, have a different status as artifacts when copies of such images sever links to the spiritual or supernatural. The German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin brought particular attention to this point in his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in

5244-543: The image can be adjusted, most often by " dodging " (reducing the amount of light to a specific area of an image by selectively blocking light to it for part or all of the exposure time) and/or "burning" (giving additional exposure to specific area of an image by exposing only it while blocking light to the rest). Filters, usually thin pieces of colored plastic, can be used to increase or decrease an image's contrast (the difference between dark tones and light tones). One method of photographic printing, called "split filter printing,"

5336-471: The image's creator intended them. An image may be taken simply as a more or less "accurate" copy of a person, place, thing, or event. It may represent an abstract concept, such as the political power of a ruler or ruling class, a practical or moral lesson, an object for spiritual or religious veneration, or an object—human or otherwise—to be desired. It may also be regarded for its purely aesthetic qualities, rarity, or monetary value. Such reactions can depend on

5428-428: The image-bearing layer was stripped from the paper and transferred to a hardened gelatin support. The first transparent plastic roll film followed in 1889. It was made from highly flammable nitrocellulose known as nitrate film. Although cellulose acetate or " safety film " had been introduced by Kodak in 1908, at first it found only a few special applications as an alternative to the hazardous nitrate film, which had

5520-503: The image. In modern times, the development of " non-fungible tokens " (NFTs) has been touted as an attempt to create "authentic" or "unique" images that have a monetary value, existing only in digital format. This assumption has been widely debated. The development of synthetic acoustic technologies and the creation of sound art have led to considering the possibilities of a sound-image made up of irreducible phonic substance beyond linguistic or musicological analysis. A still image

5612-507: The image. The discovery of the camera obscura ("dark chamber" in Latin ) that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China . Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments. The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) also invented

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5704-635: The interior structures of the human body (among other objects), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) , positron emission tomography (PET scans) , and others. Such processes often rely on detecting electromagnetic radiation that occurs beyond the light spectrum visible to the human eye and converting such signals into recognizable images. Aside from sculpture and other physical activities that can create three-dimensional images from solid material, some modern techniques, such as holography , can create three-dimensional images that are reproducible but intangible to human touch. Some photographic processes can now render

5796-403: The introduction of automated photo printing equipment. After a transition period centered around 1995–2005, color film was relegated to a niche market by inexpensive multi-megapixel digital cameras. Film continues to be the preference of some photographers because of its distinctive "look". In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a charge-coupled device for imaging, eliminating

5888-405: The invention of the daguerreotype and other photographic processes in the mid-19th century. By the late 20th century, works like John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Susan Sontag 's On Photography questioned the hidden assumptions of power, race, sex, and class encoded in even realistic images, and how those assumptions and such images may implicate the viewer in the voyeuristic position of

5980-404: The late 1910s they were not available in the large formats preferred by most professional photographers, so the new medium did not immediately or completely replace the old. Because of the superior dimensional stability of glass, the use of plates for some scientific applications, such as astrophotography , continued into the 1990s, and in the niche field of laser holography , it has persisted into

6072-463: The light emitted by one is so low that most printers do not use one at all. Another use for a darkroom is to load film in and out of cameras, development spools, or film holders, which requires complete darkness. Lacking a darkroom, a photographer can make use of a changing bag , which is a small bag with sleeved arm holes specially designed to be completely light proof and used to prepare film prior to exposure or developing. During exposure, values in

6164-418: The majority of black-and-white papers are sensitive to only blue, or to blue and green light, a red- or amber-colored light can be safely used without exposing the paper. Color print paper, being sensitive to all parts of the visible spectrum, must be kept in complete darkness until the prints are properly fixed. A very dim variation of safelight that can be used with certain negative color materials exists, but

6256-686: The making of images, even though the extent of that proscription has varied with time, place, and sect or denomination of a given religion. In Judaism, one of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai forbids the making of "any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under earth." In Christian history, periods of iconoclasm (the destruction of images, especially those with religious meanings or connotations) have broken out from time to time, and some sects and denominations have rejected or severely limited

6348-722: The need for film: the Sony Mavica . While the Mavica saved images to disk, the images were displayed on television, and the camera was not fully digital. The first digital camera to both record and save images in a digital format was the Fujix DS-1P created by Fujifilm in 1988. In 1991, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100 , the first commercially available digital single-lens reflex camera. Although its high cost precluded uses other than photojournalism and professional photography, commercial digital photography

6440-415: The new field. He invented the cyanotype process, later familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". He had discovered in 1819 that sodium thiosulphate was a solvent of silver halides, and in 1839 he informed Talbot (and, indirectly, Daguerre) that it could be used to "fix" silver-halide-based photographs and make them completely light-fast. He made

6532-553: The nitrate of silver." The shadow images eventually darkened all over. The first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce , but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825. In 1826 he made the View from the Window at Le Gras , the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e., of the image of

6624-555: The overall sensitivity of emulsions steadily reduced the once-prohibitive long exposure times required for color, bringing it ever closer to commercial viability. Autochrome , the first commercially successful color process, was introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Autochrome plates incorporated a mosaic color filter layer made of dyed grains of potato starch , which allowed the three color components to be recorded as adjacent microscopic image fragments. After an Autochrome plate

6716-518: The philosophy of art. While such studies inevitably deal with issues of meaning, another approach to signification was suggested by the American philosopher, logician, and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce . "Images" are one type of the broad category of "signs" proposed by Peirce. Although his ideas are complex and have changed over time, the three categories of signs that he distinguished stand out: A single image may exist in all three categories at

6808-535: The present day, as daguerreotypes could only be replicated by rephotographing them with a camera. Talbot's famous tiny paper negative of the Oriel window in Lacock Abbey , one of a number of camera photographs he made in the summer of 1835, may be the oldest camera negative in existence. In March 1837, Steinheil, along with Franz von Kobell , used silver chloride and a cardboard camera to make pictures in negative of

6900-1087: The process. The cyanotype process, for example, produces an image composed of blue tones. The albumen print process, publicly revealed in 1847, produces brownish tones. Many photographers continue to produce some monochrome images, sometimes because of the established archival permanence of well-processed silver-halide-based materials. Some full-color digital images are processed using a variety of techniques to create black-and-white results, and some manufacturers produce digital cameras that exclusively shoot monochrome. Monochrome printing or electronic display can be used to salvage certain photographs taken in color which are unsatisfactory in their original form; sometimes when presented as black-and-white or single-color-toned images they are found to be more effective. Although color photography has long predominated, monochrome images are still produced, mostly for artistic reasons. Almost all digital cameras have an option to shoot in monochrome, and almost all image editing software can combine or selectively discard RGB color channels to produce

6992-583: The reproduction of an object formed by light waves coming from the object. A volatile image exists or is perceived only for a short period. This may be a reflection of an object by a mirror, a projection of a camera obscura , or a scene displayed on a cathode-ray tube . A fixed image , also called a hard copy , is one that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textile . A mental image exists in an individual's mind as something one remembers or imagines. The subject of an image does not need to be real; it may be an abstract concept such as

7084-462: The research of Boris Kossoy in 1980. The German newspaper Vossische Zeitung of 25 February 1839 contained an article entitled Photographie , discussing several priority claims – especially Henry Fox Talbot 's – regarding Daguerre's claim of invention. The article is the earliest known occurrence of the word in public print. It was signed "J.M.", believed to have been Berlin astronomer Johann von Maedler . The astronomer John Herschel

7176-424: The rise, first of instant photography technology and later digital photography , darkrooms are decreasing in popularity, though are still commonplace on college campuses, schools and in the studios of many professional photographers. Other applications of darkrooms include the use in nondestructive testing , such as magnetic particle inspection . In most darkrooms, an enlarger , an optical apparatus similar to

7268-458: The same new term from these roots independently. Hércules Florence , a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, Brazil , used the French form of the word, photographie , in private notes which a Brazilian historian believes were written in 1834. This claim is widely reported but is not yet largely recognized internationally. The first use of the word by Florence became widely known after

7360-471: The same time. The Statue of Liberty provides an example. While there have been countless two-dimensional and three-dimensional "reproductions" of the statue (i.e., "icons" themselves), the statue itself exists as The nature of images, whether three-dimensional or two-dimensional, created for a specific purpose or only for aesthetic pleasure, has continued to provoke questions and even condemnation at different times and places. In his dialogue, The Republic ,

7452-514: The scene, appeared as brightly colored ghosts in the resulting projected or printed images. Implementation of color photography was hindered by the limited sensitivity of early photographic materials, which were mostly sensitive to blue, only slightly sensitive to green, and virtually insensitive to red. The discovery of dye sensitization by photochemist Hermann Vogel in 1873 suddenly made it possible to add sensitivity to green, yellow and even red. Improved color sensitizers and ongoing improvements in

7544-447: The subconscious and affective, thus evading direct inquiry through contemplative reasoning. By doing so such axiomatic images let us know what we shall desire (liberalism, in a snapshot: the crunchy honey-flavored cereals and the freshly-pressed orange juice in the back of a suburban one-family home) and from what we shall obstain (communism, in a snapshot: lifeless crowds of men and machinery marching towards certain perdition accompanied by

7636-494: The terms that have replaced "persistence of vision", though no one term seems adequate to describe the process. Image-making seems to have been common to virtually all human cultures since at least the Paleolithic era . Prehistoric examples of rock art —including cave paintings , petroglyphs , rock reliefs , and geoglyphs —have been found on every inhabited continent. Many of these images seem to have served various purposes: as

7728-518: The three images made in their complementary colors , a subtractive method of color reproduction pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauron in the late 1860s. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made extensive use of this color separation technique, employing a special camera which successively exposed the three color-filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate . Because his exposures were not simultaneous, unsteady subjects exhibited color "fringes" or, if rapidly moving through

7820-579: The tunes of Soviet Russian songs). What makes those images so powerful is that it is only of relative minor relevance for the stabilization of such images whether they actually capture and correspond with the multiple layers of reality, or not. Despite, or perhaps because of, the widespread use of religious and spiritual imagery worldwide, the making of images and the depiction of gods or religious subjects has been subject to criticism, censorship, and criminal penalties. The Abrahamic religions ( Judaism , Christianity , and Islam ) all have had admonitions against

7912-507: The use of religious imagery. Islam tends to discourage religious depictions, sometimes quite rigorously, and often extends that to other forms of realistic imagery, favoring calligraphy or geometric designs instead. Depending on time and place, photographs and broadcast images in Islamic societies may be less subject to outright prohibition. In any religion, restrictions on image-making are especially targeted to avoid depictions of "false gods" in

8004-407: The viewer's context. A religious image in a church may be regarded differently than the same image mounted in a museum. Some might view it simply as an object to be bought or sold. Viewers' reactions will also be guided or shaped by their education, class, race, and other contexts. The study of emotional sensations and their relationship to any given image falls into the categories of aesthetics and

8096-406: The world as the gift of France, which occurred when complete working instructions were unveiled on 19 August 1839. In that same year, American photographer Robert Cornelius is credited with taking the earliest surviving photographic self-portrait. In Brazil, Hercules Florence had apparently started working out a silver-salt-based paper process in 1832, later naming it Photographie . Meanwhile,

8188-486: Was monochrome , or black-and-white . Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost, chemical stability, and its "classic" photographic look. The tones and contrast between light and dark areas define black-and-white photography. Monochromatic pictures are not necessarily composed of pure blacks, whites, and intermediate shades of gray but can involve shades of one particular hue depending on

8280-407: Was reversal processed to produce a positive transparency , the starch grains served to illuminate each fragment with the correct color and the tiny colored points blended together in the eye, synthesizing the color of the subject by the additive method . Autochrome plates were one of several varieties of additive color screen plates and films marketed between the 1890s and the 1950s. Kodachrome ,

8372-409: Was born. Digital imaging uses an electronic image sensor to record the image as a set of electronic data rather than as chemical changes on film. An important difference between digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography resists photo manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper , while digital imaging is a highly manipulative medium. This difference allows for

8464-438: Was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green and blue filters . This provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image. Transparent prints of the images could be projected through similar color filters and superimposed on the projection screen, an additive method of color reproduction. A color print on paper could be produced by superimposing carbon prints of

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