With photographs taking up to eight hours,
you wouldn’t want to shoot a group photo.THINK IMAGE MANIPULATION today
and Adobe’s Photoshop software may
spring to mind. In fact, so embedded
in popular culture is this program that
‘photoshopping’ has even entered the
lexicon. Image manipulation has been
normalized to the extent that photoshop is
more of a term to describe this technology
than the application itself. But how did we
get here? Adobe’s giant plays a massive
role in this whole industry, but it wasn’t
the start. Before getting familiar with
where image manipulation came from, we
need to understand what it truly means.
In short, image manipulation is the
art of transforming an image to get a
specific and desired look. Of course, it’s
not quite as simple as it sounds and there
are plenty of implications to it. Since the
creation of the first camera, photo editing
has naturally developed alongside it.
It’s interesting to note that image
editing actually came before digital
cameras themselves, way before in
fact. Let’s scroll all the way back to the
19th century and a Frenchman named
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who in 182 6,
shocked everyone with the world’s
first photograph. Today’s technology is
evolving at such an alarming rate that
we become immune to its effects, but
imagine way back in 182 6, what it meant
to take a view and freeze it in time.
The start of photography emerged with
the creation of the ‘camera obscura’ and
this helped create the first photograph.
Camera obscura is Latin for ‘dark room’
and surprisingly enough, it involved a
dark room or box with a small lens or
hole on one side, through which an image
is projected onto a wall or surface. Using
camera obscura on a photographic plate
of pewter (malleable metal alloy), Joseph
Nicéphore Niépce created an image of
a view outside of his studio window. On
the plate was a light-sensitive compound
created by Niépce, and the image took
eight hours in direct sunlight to develop.
He stumbled upon this method whilst
trying to make it in the growing market
of lithography. This printing technique
involves engraving or etching into a wax-
like, oily substance on a plate, then using
a chemical process that repels the ink to
transfer it onto paper to create an image.
It may sound like some sort of Skyrim
spell, but it works. Niépce used camera
obscura to cast an image in which heA SNAP FROM
THE PAST
would then etch to try and recreate using
lithography. Despite this clever tracing
technique, his hands weren’t steady
enough for his liking. He knew that certain
chemicals reacted to light, so he tested to
see if an image from the camera obscura
would stay on a chemically coated plate.
Using a self-made shellac mixture,
Niépce finally hit the jackpot. After
discovering this huge advancement in
art, he spent the next two years refining
the process. He set up this technique
on his windowsill from his workshop
and technically snapped up the world’s
first photograph after eight hours of
exposure. It was this process called the
heliograph that was the first major step in
photography.COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
In 182 9, Niépce partnered with another
French artist, Louis Daguerre. This
was the start of the first commercial
photography process. Unfortunately,
Niépce passed away just four years later,
but in his final few years with Daguerre,
the pair continued developing the process
and fine-tuning it. After Niépce’s death,
Daguerre kept trying to perfect this art
of photography to push it to a commercial
level, with a process he named
‘daguerreotype’ after himself, naturally.
He discovered that mercury could
speed up the development process of
a latent image from eight hours to just
30 minutes. That’s a pretty impressive
reduction in time. In 183 9, he introduced
this process at the meeting of the French
Academy of Sciences in Paris and unveiled
it to the public. Niépce’s son, along
with Daguerre, sold the rights for the
daguerreotype to the French government
later in the same year.
The daguerreotype process is
performed on a sheet of copper that has
a thin layer of silver without the use of a
negative. This is a direct-positive process
that would create a highly detailed image
on the plate. This technique was pretty
laborious though and was not easy for
everyone to be able to carry it out.
Around the same time over in the UK,
William Henry Fox Talbot was focusing on
a similar technique, yet his idea had a fairly
significant twist. Talbot was a scientist,
inventor, a pioneer of photography, and
also a Member of Parliament, a pretty
busy guy to say the least.Following a trip to Lake Como in Italy in
183 3, Talbot attempted to draw the scenery
with little success. This annoyance
prompted him to invent a machine
that would use light-sensitive paper to
capture the scenery automatically. He
kept perfecting his idea and just three
weeks after Daguerre publicly unveiled
daguerreotype, Talbot reported his ‘art of
photogenic drawing’ to the Royal Society.
Instead of the image appearing on a
copper plate, it based the prints on light-
sensitive paper. This was an impressive
feat, and as we all know now, paper is
certainly the preferred media to print
on. However, Talbot didn’t stop there.
He created three of the most important
primary elements of photography;
developing, fixing, and printing. Exposing
photographic paper to the light created an
image although it is far from simple and
needed extremely long exposure times.
He accidentally discovered that there wasimage manipulation