ChApter 1. digitAl CAmerAs & imAges
10 For more on textbooks in digitAl photogrAphy, visit http://www.photoCourse.Com
http://www.photocourse.com/itext/boxcamera/
Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-
Haitham, also known as
Alhazen, is shown here
on a new Iraqi 10,
Dinar note. He gave the
first correct explanation
of vision, showing that
light is reflected from
an object into the eye.
He is said to have
‘invented’ the camera
obscura.
Interestingly, cameras
were discovered
before photography.
People were seeing
the projected image
hundreds of years
before they could
capture it.
in the Beginning...1
Long before photography was discovered, artists used camera obscuras—
“dark chambers” in Italian. Light entering the chamber through a small open-
ing, called a pinhole, projected an image of the scene onto the opposite wall.
At first special rooms were designed to display this “magical” phenomenon
but in the sixteenth century, Italian artists shrunk the large chamber to a por-
table box, replaced the pinhole opening with a lens, added a mirror to invert
the image and a translucent ground glass screen to display it. They traced
the projected image by hand, and it was the desire of Henry Fox Talbot and
others to capture the image directly that led to the invention of photography.
Despite the dramatic changes in technology over the years, the dark box and
the lens still form the foundation of modern photography.Here is a modern Wista
view camera. With
its flexible bellows
removed, you can
see the ground glass
focusing screen that
is replaced by film or
a digital back when a
photo is taken. A lens
projects a scene onto
this screen upside
down. Courtesy of HP
Marketing Corp at http://www.
hpmarketingcorp.com.
Click to see how all
cameras are just dark
boxes.