I have often said that to be a great photographer, you need to understand how your camera works. I still hold by this statement. I first learned how a camera worked when I was in 6th grade doing photography projects for 4-H, and we discussed it again in my introductory photography classes in college. Just knowing what your camera is doing when you take a picture can make a huge difference in not only how you take pictures but in the end quality of your images.

Let’s start at the beginning. The first camera was known as the “camera obscura” which is Latin for “dark chamber.” It’s a great name for the device because it’s quite a literal translation. The first cameras were actual darkened rooms or tents with a pin point hole cut into the wall. Light would come through this opening and transfer an upside down miniature image onto another surface inside.

Originally artists used this technique to trace the landscape, person, etc. outside their camera obscura. This method was used by both amateur and professional artists in a variety of mediums.

There are some photographers who still use this method to create some very interesting imagery. Abelardo Morrell is one such photographer. He has used rooms across the world (hotel rooms, gallery rooms, abandoned rooms, etc.) to make simple cameras, Camera Obscura. He made the rooms themselves into the camera by covering the windows in the room with light tight material and removing a one inch square in the center of the window in order to create a simple lens. These images were taken by setting his camera up in the room with a long exposure (a very slow shutter speed).

Eventually these camera obscuras were shrunk down to a box size for easier use.

The first camera obscura that was small and portable enough for practical use was built by Johann Zahn in 1685. At that point in time, there was no way to preserve the images produced by these camera. However, in 1724, Johann Heinrich Schultz discovered that a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Early photography built on these discoveries and developments. The early photographic cameras were essentially similar to Zahn’s camera obscura, though usually with the addition of sliding boxes for focusing. Before each exposure, a sensitized plate would be inserted in front of the viewing screen to record the image. The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris and building on Schultz’s discovery about silver and chalk mixtures darkening when exposed to light. Other forms of creating these permanent images eventually developed. Jacques Daguerre’s popular daguerreotype process utilized copper plates, while the calotype process invented by William Fox Talbot recorded images on paper.

However there was one problem. All these forms of cameras required a long exposure time to capture the image. That is until 1850 when Frederick Scott Archer created the collodian wet plate process which cut exposure times dramatically. The one downfall to this method was the it required photographers to prepare and develop their glass plates on the spot, usually in some kind of mobile darkroom. Other types of wet plate cameras were created as well, like the ambrotypes and tintypes, but they all required some type of on the spot processing.

Here’s a quick rundown of the different types of cameras as they were created:

• Plate Cameras – These are the cameras we were just discussing. This is the type of camera you may have seen in old films where the photographer would drape a dark cloth over his/her head.

• Large Format Cameras – The large format camera is a direct successor of the early plate cameras and remain in use for high quality photography and for technical, architectural and industrial photography. There are three common types, the monorail camera, the field camera and the press camera. All use large format sheets of film, although there are backs for medium format 120-film available for most systems, and have an extensible bellows with the lens and shutter mounted on a lens plate at the front. These cameras have a wide range of movements allowing very close control of focus and perspective.

• Medium Format Cameras – Medium-format cameras have a film size somewhere in between the large format cameras and the smaller 35mm cameras. Typically these systems use 120- or 220-film. The most common sizes being 6×4.5 cm, 6×6 cm and 6×7 cm. The designs of this kind of camera show greater variation than their larger brethren, ranging from monorail systems through the classic Hasselblad model with separate backs, to smaller rangefinder cameras. There are even compact amateur cameras available in this format.

• Folding Cameras – The introduction of films enabled the existing designs for plate cameras to be made much smaller and for the base-plate to be hinged so that it could be folded up compressing the bellows. These designs were very compact and small models were dubbed Vest pocket cameras.

• Box Cameras – Box cameras were introduced as a budget level camera and had few if any controls. The original box Brownie models had a small reflex viewfinder mounted on the top of the camera and had no aperture or focusing controls and just a simple shutter. Later models such as the Brownie 127 had larger direct view optical viewfinders together with a curved film path to reduce the impact of deficiencies in the lens.

• Rangefinder Cameras – As camera and lens technology developed and wide aperture lenses became more common, range-finder cameras were introduced to make focussing more precise. The range finder has two separated viewfinder windows, one of which is linked to the focusing mechanisms and moved right or left as the focusing ring is turned. The two separate images are brought together on a ground glass viewing screen. When vertical lines in the object being photographed meet exactly in the combined image, the object is in focus. A normal composition viewfinder is also provided.

• Single Lens Reflex (SLRs) – This is the type of camera most commonly used by professional photographers today. There is enough explanation that can go into this one camera that we’ll save it for the next post.

Well that’s a fun little bit of history for today. Next time I’ll post about the development of SLRs and how knowing about SLR cameras can help you further develop your images.

Have an awesome weekend!

Contact Me | Visit My Website | Join the Facebook Fan Page | Follow Me on Twitter