Slashdot Mirror
World's First Photo
angkor cut-and-pastes
"'The image acknowledged as the world's first photograph - taken by a French inventor in 1826 - has passed its first full-scale analysis with flying colors and is now awaiting an airtight case that will keep it safe for centuries to come, scientists said Wednesday.'" See also the first color photography.
that the world's second photo was of a naked woman.
I've lost track of the humber of technologies that were initially driven by porn. BBS's, Video CD's, e-commerce, and of course, the amazing X10 camera.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
A little more info on the inventor here and here
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The first picture I ever took with my digital camera faded away, due to the ink in my canon inkjet
Do you think in 5 years I'll be able to pull these pictures off my CDR's? Much less to show my grandchildren...
The first one was destroyed after the photographer realized his thumb was over the aperture.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
As you see, both walls, the one showing left and the right one, are lit by the sun. Also the sky seems somewhat blurry and apears to have something one might call an 'intense twighlight'.
That's because he exposed the "Film" over the entire day in order to actually make a picture, thus tracking every daylight condition and them changing with the path of the sun.
This is indeed an amazing inovative feat. I would have liked to meet this guy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...to have a Reuters sig under a photo obviously in the public domain for a long time.
Capitalism is no excuse for the privatisation of the commons. Signing this photo reuters instead of Niepce is clearly stealing.
Given the above, I remember reading that one possibility for the Turin Shroud was that it was an early, and I mean early, photograph. Apparently, the Turks had developed a method of photography involving canvas and I -think- silver nitrate (maybe mercury?). This was in use during the 1500s, as far as I recally the article saying.
Now, the photography they were talking about wouldn't bear much resemblence to a camera as we would recognise it. I believe the subject had to be very still, covered in this impregnated cloth and then the light would do the rest.
I realise this is a very sketchy post, but I'm at work right now and really am not able to spend ages chasing down the relevant information. Just chucking this one out for a bit of interest really...
Cheers,
Ian
See the various links one, two, three.
Grain of salt not provided. This quickly wanders off into the land of wierdos, as there is also a lot of political infighting in the land of psuedo science. The Idea of the Shroud being a hoax is politically loaded.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Many early photographers died of horrible nervous conditions, a result of exposure to toxic chemicals used in Daguerrotype and other early photographic processes. Ambrotype and tintype, introduced in the 1850's, were faster and the chemicals involved were both cheaper and safer.
There are quite a few more photos available at the Prokudin-Gorskii Exhibition than officially linked from the pages of the exhibition. If I'm not mistaken, 111 photos are available, but only 61 are linked. How to reach them is quite trivial and left as an execise for the reader. Hey, you'll even get the chance to have a beautiful picture of Alix Chevallier!
I saw the real thing several years ago in a lobby to one of the upper floors of the Harry Ransom Center here at UT. The picture is tiny, and the image faint, looking for all the world like a scrap of tinfoil with the image only visible from certain angles, manifested as a slight difference in the gloss of the surface. I can't help but wonder what it looked like when it was new.
There were many wonders to behold in that building. On that particular visit, I was "behind the ropes" to do some maintenance work on a database server sitting in the corner of one of the center's conservation rooms. Sitting near me were a remarkable array of items, ranging from a model sailboat used in the making of an old John Huston film, to a collection of original Edgar Allen Poe manuscripts. And these were items that weren't even on display. I would've love to have just spent months rummaging around in that one room...
Sadly, much of the collection of the Harry Ransom Center is accessible on to scholars on a by-reservation basis. Fortunately, plans are in place to make the collects more accessible to the public.
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
In fact the town (Chalon sur Saone, in Burgundy) is a quiet place with very little tourism. Should that photo be there, however, perhaps it would be taken more often for what it is - the birthplace of modern photography. There is a little Museum there (The Niepce Museum) which is fantastically interesting. Sadly its piece de resistance is in Texas.
Chalon sur Saone still has a big Kodak factory though. A lot of you who may have toured in Paris etc may have bought film manufactured there.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
In my opinion, the RGB separation is not nearly as cool as the roughly contemporary work of Gabriel Lipmann. His 1891 system achieved full accurate color using no dyed materials in either the film or the viewing system (I.e. no color filters etc.)
Lipmann turned a clear glass B&W film plate so the emulsion faced away from the lens (I.e. the light had to travel through the thickness of the light to reach the emulsion). He placed the emulsion in contact with a reflecting mercury bath. Light from the lens traveled through the emulsion twice, once on its way from the lens, and again bouncing back from the mercury mirror thus forming....standing waves through the thickness of the emulsion.
In other words, color was recorded according in the third plane...through the thickness of the exposed material. Blue light = tightly spaced waves, red = less tight. The plate is viewed by again sandwiching against the mercury reflector, and viewing in white lite. The interference causes the colors to reappear.
Note that these colors are 100% accurate as long as the dimensions of the emulsion are stable. Of course, the balance can change if the viewing light isn't white.
I read about this in a Pop Photo in the 1960's, I think. One of the most beautiful pieces of scientific/photographic work I've heard of. He won a Nobel prize for this in 1908.
(* No...in this theory the whole thing is meant to be a photograph. It's the light that created the effect, not actual contact. So your geometry-based objections are overcome. *)
Since nobody knows how it was created, it cannot be (yet) called a "photograph". The 1826 photo we know came from a *lense* and we know pretty much how it was created.
We don't know if the Shroud used lenses or anything. There has been suggestion that pigment was detected, so it appears that some artistry was involved.
Interesting how the first photo was not a negative. His process turned white under light instead of dark.
Table-ized A.I.