History of photography

• The photo was taken by Joseph Niepce and named ‘view from the window’. The scene took place in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. The photo shows the surrounding castle and other buildings. A projected image from the window hit a sensitized plate, which was then used to place the image on paper. A lot of work went into this photo, and we are lucky it survived.

• When the Apollo 11 mission took off for the moon, they carried 12 Hasselblad cameras with them. They are still there, on the moon. The astronauts decided the cameras were too heavy for the return journey. So, they left them behind to make space for the 25 kilos of rock samples they brought back. They did, however, bring the film back with them.

• Well, it wasn’t made from the same stuff we make roads and pavements from. It was, however, made into varnish and applied to copper or glass plates. The asphalt was commonly known as Bitumen. It was a black viscous liquid that was light-sensitive.

• The Most Popular Subjects for Photography in the 1800s Weren’t Alive. The Most Popular Subjects for Photography in the 1800s Weren’t Alive.

• You might not believe it, but Caffenol is a real thing. Use coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda to develop your black and white negatives. The first two ingredients bind together to form a developer. The washing soda adds alkalinity to the solution, allowing you to develop images.

• This photography fact might not be surprising. The most viewed photograph is the default wallpaper for Windows XP. The image named ‘Bliss”, captured by Charles O’Rear in 1996. He didn’t make as much money as you would imagine. Microsoft bought the image from stock website Corbis.

• This is almost one of those photography facts that you wish you didn’t know. But once you know it, you can never unknow it. Every two minutes, we snap more pictures than the whole of humanity did in the 1800s. Only a few million images were taken in the 80 years leading up to the first commercial camera. In 1999, Kodak reported that we had taken approximately 80 billion pictures. The estimate is that we share 730 billion images a year on Facebook alone.

• Apparently, the left side of our faces looks better in photos than the right side. A study conducted by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schrillo from Wake Forest University confirms this. Their study shows that the left side of our face exhibits a greater intensity of emotion. Because of this, we perceive it as being more attractive.

• Photography went through many technological advances before it reached the first film negative. These included the Camera Obscura and the Daguerreotype. It was none other than William Henry Fox Talbot who created the first negative. It became known as a salted Calotype. He mixed silver iodide and a developing agent to create the negative. The developing agent was a mixture of gallic acid and silver nitrate. His negative made reprinting positive images easy and quick through contact printing. This event occurred in 1839, but he didn’t announce it until 1841. This is part of the reason why Fox gained the Rumford medal of the Royal Society a few years later.

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was the creator of the first recorded image. He is, however, better known for his other inventions, propellers and boats. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce also invented the first internal combustion engine, called the Pyréolophore, with his brother in 1807.

• Old photographs were taken with huge large format cameras. Because the technology wasn’t as advanced, an image would take hours to expose correctly. The subjects didn’t smile because they had to stay still for hours for one photo. Taking a photo often involved the use of a head brace for support. Understandably, smiling for hours was an impossible feat.