Capture - Digital Photography Essential

The concept of the camera is far older than the idea of photography. The Chinese philosopher Mozi, who lived 400 years before Christ, developed the concept that would become known as the camera obscura. Aristotle used the concept around 300 BC to devise an instrument with which he could
view a solar eclipse. The term camera obscura comes from Latin and means a darkened room. It is a room that has no light entering except through a small opening in one wall. The light energy from outside the room passes through the small opening and creates a projected image on the wall opposite the opening. This is the basic construct of the pinhole camera and all cameras that followed.
In the 17th century it was found that lenses could be placed inside the opening in the wall, which increased the light-gathering power of the opening. With this discovery the camera obscura was made smaller and became portable, allowing artists to use the device to create sketches for their paintings. The famous painter Canaletto was renowned for his paintings of Venice in the 1720s. The sketches for these paintings were made with a camera obscura.
The inventors of photography used the camera obscura as a device to capture their images. The famous mousetrap cameras invented by William Henry Fox Talbot were very small camera obscurae that utilized large lenses with very short focal lengths to focus light energy on the very insensitive
paper he bathed with sodium chloride and silver nitrate to use as his lightcapturing surface.


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