|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Impact of This Imaging Tool
| Article
# : |
11957 |
|
|
Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
2,747 Words |
| Author
: |
Stanton Wormley
Stanton Wormley is a free-lance writer who resides in
Bridgton, Maine. |
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of photographic film on modern life. An indication of this impact is the popularity of amateur photography in industrialized nations. In France, for example, nearly one out of every two adults owns a camera, while in Japan there are over a dozen magazines dealing exclusively with photography. In 1987, amateur photographers in the United States will take an estimated ten billion pictures. Motion picture attendance also attests to the power of film images. In 1986, Hollywood's second-best year ever, American moviegoers purchased some 1.02 billion tickets, or about four tickets for every person in the country.
Photographic images do more than entertain, of course, as demonstrated by their wide use in advertising, journalism, and education. Less familiar, perhaps, but equally important are the contributions photography makes in astronomy, medicine, industry, printing, and the military - contributions made possible, in many instances, by the capabilities of modern photographic film.
Photographic Film: a Brief History
The earliest practical photographic material, the daguerrotype, was introduced in 1839 by the French painter Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851). The daguerrotype process employed a sensitized silver plate which, after fifteen to thirty minutes of exposure in a camera, was developed by mercury vapor, producing a crisp and detailed positive image. Though popular, the daguerrotype suffered from the long exposures required and the inability to produce multiple images from the plate.
In the same year, an Englishman, Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) invented the negative-positive process, which serves as the basis for many modern photographic materials. Talbot used a waxed paper negative to produce a positive image on sensitized paper. Although Talbot's process allowed the creation of an unlimited number of prints from a single negative, it did not achieve the clarity - or the commercial success - of the daguerrotype.
A popular alternative to both of these methods was the wet collodion process, developed by British sculptor and photographer Frederick Scott Archer (1813-1857) in 1851. Archer used a glass plate coated with a solution of collodion - a mixture of alcohol, ether, and guncotton - and light-sensitive silver salts. This plate was both exposed and developed in a wet state. The wet collodion process, though cumbersome, required exposure times of only two or three
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
