Camera Obscura History

Focusing in on the blurry display of the sunset, and then click! All of the beauty of the sky was captured within that one moment, which will stay in vivid colors forever. Photos are a very important artifact in people’s lives that preserve memories and keep history in a single image. Without the many innovations that many photographic techniques and cameras went through in history even from the earliest inventions, then people would not have the cameras and that the world sees today.

This simple machine received its name from the Latin language meaning dark chamber. It was so simple of a machine that all it required was a dark room or box with a small hole in one side, and viola! A camera obscura is made. The small hole allows light to pass

(Welch para 10). In times of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe, the camera obscura was used by a range of different people, from astronomers, who used it to view the sun and solar eclipses, to artists, who used the invention to assist them in large scale painting projects (Andrews para 2). The camera obscura never had a proper account of how it actually worked until around the eleventh century when Alhazen, an Arab scholar first gave a detailed report of a working device and people could actually see how the machine operated (Andrews para

When produced, colored pictures were extremely sensitive to light and when exposed to it would almost instantly disappear (Welch para 38). The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, found a solution to the bothersome problem when they discovered that when dyed potato starch was used, that they could create colored images in a quality that no one had ever seen before (Andrews para 9). Co-founder of the famous company Polaroid, Edwin Land did not believe the theory of the RGB (Red Green Blue) color process, which was the main belief at the time, and thought instead that the human eye could sense red and green light as it passed through the structures of the eye, which he called the “two-color process” (Welch para 40). The two-color process became the idea from which Land and the Polaroid company would build their ideas and triumphs off of (Welch para