Assignment 1 Photography

Mohd Jamri Mohd Naji

Mohd Jamri Mohd Naji Matric no: 0821617 CCPS 3101 Section 3 Lecturer: Bro. Adam

2011

A Brief History of Photography Beginnings Photography started with a camera and the basic idea has been around since about the 5th Century B.C. For centuries these were just ideas until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura sometime in the 11th Century. Even then, the camera did not actually record images, they simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down. The first camera obscuras used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It took until the 17th Century for camera obscuras to be made small enough to be portable and basic lenses to be added. Permanent Images Photography as we know it today began in the late 1830s in France when Joseph Nicphore Nipce used a portable camera obscura to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly.

Daguerreotype This experiment led to collaboration between Nipce and Louis Daguerre that resulted in the creation of the Daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were the forerunners to our modern film. A copper plate was coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapor before it was exposed to light. To create the image on the plate, the earlier Daguerreotypes had to be exposed to light for up to 15 minutes. The Daguerreotype was very popular until it was replaced in the late 1850s by emulsion plates. Emulsion Plates Emulsion plates, or wet plates, were less expensive than Daguerreotypes and took only two or three seconds of exposure time. This made them much more suited to portrait photography, which was the most common photography at the time. These wet plates used an emulsion process called the Collodion process, rather than a simple coating on the image plate. Two of these emulsion plates were ambrotype and tintype. Ambrotypes used a glass plate instead of the copper plate of the Daguerreotypes. Tintypes used a tin plate. While these plates were much more sensitive to light, they had to be developed quickly. It was during this time that bellows were added to cameras to help with focusing. Dry Plates In the 1870s, photography took another huge leap forward. Richard Maddox improved on a previous invention to make dry gelatine plates that were nearly equal with wet plates for speed and quality. These dry plates could be stored rather than made as needed. This allowed photographers much more freedom in taking photographs. Cameras were also able to be smaller so that they could be hand-held. As exposure times decreased, the first camera with a mechanical shutter was developed.

Cameras for Everyone Photography was only for professionals or the very rich until George Eastman started a company called Kodak in the 1880s. Eastman created a flexible roll film that did not require the constant changing of solid plates. This allowed him to develop a self-contained box camera that held 100 exposures of film. This camera had a small single lens with no focusing adjustment. The consumer would take pictures and then send the camera back to the factory to for the film to be developed, much like our disposable cameras today. This was the first camera inexpensive enough for the average person to afford. The film was still large in comparison to today's 35mm film. It took until the late 1940s for 35mm film to become cheap enough for most people to afford.

The Horrors of War Around 1930, Henri-Cartier Bresson and other photographers began to use small 35mm cameras to capture images of life as it occurred rather than staged portrait shots. When World War II started in 1939, many photojournalists adopted this style. The posed portraits of World War I soldiers gave way to graphic images of war and its aftermath. These images, such as Joel Rosenthal's photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima brought the reality of war across the ocean and helped galvanize the American people like never before. This style of capturing decisive moments shaped the face of photography forever. Instant Images At the same time 35mm cameras were becoming popular, Polaroid introduced the Model 95. Model 95 used a secret chemical process to develop film inside the camera in less than a minute. This new camera was fairly expensive but the novelty of instant images caught the public's attention. By the mid 1960s, Polaroid had many models on the market and the price had dropped so that even more people could afford it. Image Control While the French introduced the permanent image, the Japanese brought easy control of their images to the photographer. In the 1950s Asahi, which later became Pentax, introduced the Asahiflex and Nikon introduced its Nikon F camera. These were both SLR-type cameras and the Nikon F allowed for interchangeable lenses and other accessories. For the next 30 years SLR-type cameras remained the camera of choice and many improvements were introduced to both the cameras and the film itself. Smart Cameras In the late 1970s and early 1980s compact cameras that were capable of making image control decisions on their own were introduced. These "point and shoot" cameras calculated shutter speed, aperture, and focus; leaving photographers free to concentrate on composition. While these cameras became immensely popular with casual photographers, professionals and serious amateurs continued to prefer to make their own adjustments to image control. The Digital Age In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous manufacturers worked on cameras that stored images electronically. The first of these were point and shoot cameras that used digital media instead of film. By 1991, Kodak had produced the first digital camera advanced enough to be used successfully by professionals. Other manufacturers quickly followed and today Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and other manufacturers all offer advanced digital SLR cameras. Even the most basic point and shoot camera now takes higher quality images than Nipces pewter plate.

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Understanding Exposure Exposure in the context of photography is all about controlling the amount of light that reaches the cameras sensor when you press the cameras shutter button to start taking a photo. To create a photograph, an ideal exposure is needed to allow just the right amount of light to reach the sensor. Allowing too little light to reach the sensor will cause the resulting photo to appear dark (under exposed). On the other hand, allowing too much light to reach the sensor will lead to the photo looking too bright (over exposed).

Choosing the Right Combination An exposure can be achieved by specific combination of how much light is allowed to pass through the lens and how long it is allowed to enter. However, how do you decide on the best combination? And how do you control your camera to achieve it? A device called an iris diaphragm allows the camera to change the size of the hole in the lens known as the aperture that controls how much light is allowed to pass through the camera lens. Another device called a shutter controls the time that light is allowed to enter. Together, these two devices allow you to achieve the different combinations of how much light is allowed to pass through your cameras lens and for how long, so as to achieve the ideal exposure.

An Introduction to Aperture What is it? The aperture refers to the circular hole in a lens that allows light through. A cameras lens is designed to allow the size of the aperture to change so that the photographer can control how much light is being allowed through the lens. The mechanism that allows the aperture to vary in size is known as an iris diaphragm. The iris diaphragm can change the aperture size as it is actually composed of a series of interlocking blades that can fold in on each other or expand out.

Depth of Field The main reason why photographers would want to set different aperture sizes to shoot with is because the aperture size is the factor that has the most effect on the depth of field in a photo. Depth of field refers to the distance (depth) between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a photograph. Creative use of aperture settings can help control the depth of field in a photo.

Shutter speed refers to the amount of time a cameras sensor is exposed to the light coming through the aperture opening in the lens. This time is controlled by a device called a shutter The shutter is located just in front of the sensor. The shutter can be set to open for varied amounts of time and provides the photographer a way to precisely control how long light is allowed to reach the sensor. In compact cameras, there is no physical shutter, but an electronic one that turns the sensor on and off.

ISO refers to the light sensitivity of a cameras sensor. All modern digital cameras allow photographers to increase or decrease their ISO settings to make the sensor more reactive to light which then allows them to use faster shutter speeds without changing the aperture setting. However, the tradeoff for using high ISO settings is the appearance of a sand-like grain in photographs which is known as noise. Cameras with good noise control like advanced DSLRs allow photographs to be shot at high ISO settings with little discernable noise. A digital cameras sensor sensitivity settings are typically set at ISO 100, ISO 200, ISO 400, ISO 800, and ISO 1600. Modern DSLR cameras offer even higher sensitivity settings of ISO 3200, ISO 6400 and above. With each step, the cameras sensor sensitivity is doubled and it takes half the amount of light, or half the time to complete the exposure.

In auto mode, a digital camera is usually able to interpret colors very accurately especially in bright daylight. However, under certain lighting conditions, camera sensors are sometimes unable to adjust themselves to correctly interpret colors properly. This results in photos that look too yellowish or bluish, or tinted in a strange color. To correct this issue, you need to adjust what is known as the cameras white balance setting. A camera uses the color white to calibrate how it identifies all other colors in the scene. So, white balance refers the process of how it identifies and portrays white and other colors.

Color Temperature Before explaining how to resolve color issues, we need to know how to properly describe them. Photographers use the term color temperature to describe the tone of colors in a photo. This concept of temperature is based on a spectrum or range of colors from bluish to yellowish tones that are intuitively described as being cool to warm. Take for example the rainbow its colors are arranged from the cool to warm with red being the warmest colors and violet being the coolest. Therefore, if a camera wrongly interprets colors in a scene to produce a photo that appears too yellowish, the color tone of that image is described as too warm, conversely, if the photo appears too bluish, it is described as too cool.

General Preset White Balance Settings

Technique That I Want to Learn I want to learn to take a beautiful and outstanding landscape picture and I would like to learn the High Dynamic Range Photography technique. I think it is not an easy technique, but the result is very pleasing the eyes. My Idea of Photography Photography is very interesting for me because it can stop the time. It can keep the moment and history. It is not just an art. It means more than that because a picture is worth thousands of words and information. I like arts, especially in drawing and painting. I like to see a beautiful picture. And, my drawing is also not bad for an amateur (I think). However, photography is different. I can draw a picture how I would like it to be, correct its composition, the contrast and brightness on the canvas. But, in photography, I cannot adjust the scene as I do with my canvas. It is totally different. Thats why I like to learn about it.