The Evolution of Camera- A Brief History of the Camera

Basic Idea – Light travels in a straight line, and the image was inverted.

When Mozi (470 BC – 390 BC) observed rays of light falling on the walls of a dark room through a pinhole made on the opposite side, he perceived the outer world to be inverted.

Aristotle, a Greek Philosopher (384-322 BCE), discovered that by passing sunlight through a pinhole, he could create an inverted image of the Sun on the ground.

Al-Haythami (Alhazen), who lived from 965 to 1039, developed the theory that light moves in straight lines and is known as “rays”.

Pinhole Camera

First Stage | Experiment

A pinhole camera is a camera in the shape of a box that without a lens. One of the sides of the camera has a pinhole-sized opening to focus all light rays and produce an inverted image on the opposite side of the hole.

Drawbacks

1. The camera’s larger size made it difficult to carry.
2. The resulting image was inverted (upside down).
3. The material may only be used once.
4. To obtain a copy of an image, it is necessary to repeat the procedure each time with a new medium.

Camera Obscura

Second Stage | Major Developments

Leonardo da Vinci (1450-1519) proposed that the human eye resembles a camera obscura. He then published the first comprehensive description of the camera obscura in the Codex Atlanticus (1502).

Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) added a convex lens near the entrance of the pinhole. Della Porta popularised an improved camera obscura, and painters used his technique to depict actual scenes on canvas.

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) coined the term “camera obscura” in 1604, when he constructed the first portable camera obscura in the form of a tent.

Room Camera Obscura – First Experiment

Portable Camera Obscura – Carried on two wooden poles

Camera Obscura – Added lens and mirror

A camera obscura is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. The term “CAMERA OBSCURA” is derived from the Latin camera (chamber) and obscura (darkness). The Ancient Greek word for camera is kamara, which means “anything with an arched cover or roof, a covered carriage, a vaulted chamber, or a vault.” The first type of camera resembled a chamber or room. It was determined that inserting a lens into the hole would result in a sharper, clearer image. This technology, known as “camera obscura,” was frequently used by artists to sketch objects more quickly and alleviate the difficulties associated with depth perception. The image was projected onto a sheet of paper within a dark box, and the artist would then trace the image’s contours.

In 1572, the German mathematician Friedrich Risner (ca. 1533–1580) proposed a portable camera obscura drawing aid consisting of a lightweight wooden hut with lenses in each of its four walls that would project images of the surroundings onto a paper cube in the centre. The structure could be transported on two wooden poles, similar to a royal litter. The room-type camera obscura was reduced to a small, portable room that was still a very large box. Most authors date the first appearance of box-type camera obscuras — devices in which the lens, the mirror, and the screen onto which the image was projected were enclosed in a small wooden box — to the middle of the seventeenth century.

The use of a mirror in conjunction with the camera obscura was first suggested by the Venetian Ettore Ausonio in his manuscript Theorica speculi concavi sphaerici (1520–1570). In 1585, Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530–1585) proposed using a mirror at a 45-degree angle to the direction of light emanating from the lens to correct the image.

Portable Camera

3rd Stage Major Developments

In 1839, Daguerreotype cameras were manufactured.

In 1900, George Eastman Kodak debuted the Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera.

Kodak 3A Autographic, introduced in 1916, was the first rangefinder camera.

The German company Franke & Heidecke debuted the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex roll-film camera in 1928.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer renowned for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography.

George Eastman was an American entrepreneur. He was born on July 12, 1854, in Waterville, New York. In 1880, he opened the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, he founded the Eastman Kodak Company.

Rangefinder camera

Never look through the lens when using a Rangefinder camera. Identical to a disposable camera, you compose and focus through a window on the top right. The rangefinder looks through the small window on the left. As the focus ring is turned, it triangulates, bringing two images into perfect focus-correlation.

Twin Lens Reflex Camera

TLR is a type of camera with two identically focal length objective lenses. One of the lenses is the photographic objective or “taking lens” (the lens that captures the image), while the other is used for the viewfinder system, which is typically viewed at waist level from above.

Polaroid Camera

Inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, created the first instant camera (Model 95) in 1948 as a hobby during World War II.

Digital Camera

Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer, invented the first digital camera in 1975. It took 23 seconds to capture a single image using the camera (CCD), which was about the size of a breadbox. It captured 0.01-megapixel black-and-white images that were saved to a cassette tape.

Mirrorless camera bodies and lenses are undergoing a continuous process of innovation and new product introduction. Manufacturers are currently removing the materials mirror, pentaprism, Focus mirror, shutter, and CMOS sensor from their products.