In 1887, photography was extended to the night when two German scientists introduced
Blitzlichtpulver, or “lightning light powder.” A mixture of magnesium, potassium chlorate, and anti-
mony sulfide in a shallow pan held aloft by the photographer, Blitzlichtpulverexploded in a burst of
intense light when it was set afire. It also often set other objects on fire, including photographers,
many of whom died in the quest for the night shot.
Improvements in the camera were slow to come for the next 100 years. In the 1950s, press photog-
raphers were still using basically the same camera that Matthew Brady used, although with modern
touches such as shutters that sliced time into fractions of a second and flash attachments that kept the
burning light source safely within a glass bulb.
Even before the digital camera began its takeover of the photographic world at the turn of the millen-
nium, digital contraptions were becoming part of film photography. Simple calculating chips
improved the accuracy of light meters and automatic focusing. Some cameras accepted microchips
on cards, not unlike the memory cards used to store digital photographs, but in this case to vary
operations such as automatic exposure and focusing to meeting the requirements of sports shots,
night photography, and other specialized situations.
The real change in cameras came with the digital image sensor. We’ll see later in this section how the
sensor is a fundamental change. It’s as important as the development 150 years ago of the negative/
positive process that permits photographers to manipulate their images after they’ve left the camera.
That ability to play, endlessly, with images takes photography further from being a record of one place
and one time to a new realm of creativity. One of the two times the photographer can exercise that
creativity comes when an image reaches a digital darkroom such as the one we’ll visit in Part 3.
The other opportunity is in the realm of a new form of digital magic that uses some of a camera’s
oldest, non-digital components. It comes in the fleeting moment when light travels through the lens,
the diaphragm, and the shutter. The opportunity continues when a chip absorbs the light. The chip is
studded with photoelectric cells and massaged by a camera’s on-board computer. Is this section of
the book, we’ll see how that concoction works.
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