Moving Images, Understanding Media

48 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

of lenses. In order to develop the potential of reproduction, many discoveries

came into play, including silver nitrate and silver chloride.

In 1816, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce achieved success in registering

a temporary photographic image on paper aft er having been interested by

the idea for years. How did he do this? By this time, the primitive pinhole

camera had been improved to integrate a lens at its front to focus the light,

and Niépce wanted to fi nd a way to record the image that was projected at the

back of the box (until then, such a device had been used to help with drawing

and painting). He built a camera and then placed paper coated with silver

salts at the back of the box, and it recorded an image that

turned to black in daylight. Th e question then became:

how to make the image permanent?

After experimenting with a variety of chemical

compounds and processes, in 1826 Niépce produced the fi rst

permanent photograph, which he called heliography or “sun

writing.” It took eight hours to expose the photosensitive

chemicals that he coated onto a plate of pewter. Niépce

later began working with Louis Daguerre to improve the

process and reduce exposure time, and aft er Niépce’s death

in 1833, Daguerre developed the daguerreotype in 1837.

Th rough most of the nineteenth century, photographs were

produced by using a box camera with a lens that focused

the image on a light-sensitive plate (generally a glass plate

coated with an emulsion of silver salts).

By the second half of the century, certain basic

elements of photography had been established. Typically

the camera lens is made up of pieces of glass that work to

focus the light so that it will be projected in a controlled,

tight band as it passes through its transparent width. To

control the length of time that the light is allowed to pass

through the lens, a shutter opens and closes to admit the

light for a specifi c length of time.

At the time of of Louis Daguerre, Fox Talbot, an English

inventor, developed diff erent methods for producing

photographs which pointed the way for photography

to move in the more fruitful direction of reproducible

negatives. Although negative processes had become

the norm by the mid-nineteenth century, photographs

from this period were made onto hard plates. In order to

create the rotating spool of images necessary for motion

pictures, a transparent, fl exible fi lm base was necessary

to support a coat of light-sensitive emulsion. Th e fi lm roll

was commercialized by George Eastman in 1888, although

Reverend Hannibal Goodwin had patented and used a

supple photographic base in 1887 and won a lawsuit years

Figure 2-8 The fi rst photograph: View from

Nicéphore Niépce’s window at Gras.

(Courtesy of Getty Images)

Film advance

Camera body Viewfinder

Aperture

Lens

Focusing device

Film

Shutter

Focus

Figure 2-9 Illustration of a camera.

Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).