Thursday, August 25, 2011

A Swiveling Lens for Panoramic Views


Landscapes and cityscapes were handy subjects for early photogra­phers. But they were at a disadvantage compared with painters: The standard cameras could take in only part of a scene, since few lenses had' a viewing angle exceeding 40 degrees. When a photographer wanted a view of a city or mountain range he had to take overlap­ping views and paste them together.
In 1844, however, Friedrich von Mar­tens, an engraver-photographer living in Paris, built a camera that could take scenes like the one shown below, em­bracing an arc of 150 degrees. The se­cret was a swiveling lens, which swept around a scene, "wiping" a continuous image across a daguerreotype plate five inches high and 17,5 inches long.
In later years similar panoramic cameras were used for pictures of large groups of people like the student body of a school. Some of the results con­tained a bizarre element, for a fleet­footed prankster could get his likeness into the same picture twice by outrac­ing the camera's panning mechanism. After being photographed at one end of the group he ran around to be snapped again at the other end. 

The von Martens camera was the first to use a swiveling lens and a curved plate, devices used in the later panoramic camera pictured at far left. In the von Martens instrument, a hand crank (a) turned a gear (b) that swiveled the lens (c) in its flexible leather mount; in the later camera the lens was moved by turning the viewfinder on top. The lens had a mask with a slit (d) to restrict the image projected onto the plate (e) to a narrow strip; as the lens turned, the strip image moved across the plate, building up the picture in much the same way that a focal-plane shutter does. Like most daguerreotype pictures, it was a mirror image, reversed left for right.

FRIEDRICH VON MARTENS = Panorama of Paris, 1846

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Adding the Third Dimension

Two girls appear in a stereo photograph taken in 1853. When seen through a stereoscope like the one at right, which used a pair of lenses to magnify the two images, the slightly different views merged and the girls stood out in relief. This viewer is an ornate affair on a stand most were inexpensive hand-heId models. 
By the early 1860s a new photographic fad was sweeping Europe and America: stereoscopic photographs. These were pictures in pairs, viewed through a twin-lens device called a stereoscope, which made each pair merge into a sin­gle view that seemed startlingly three dimensional, like a perfectly detailed model of the actual scene. Almost ev­ery middle-class household boasted dozens, sometimes hundreds, of these pictures. Family and friends gathered in the parlor to gape at each new set the pyramids of Egypt, Parisian street scenes, the wonders of Peking, views of the Holy Land-all of them seeming to spring to life in vivid perspective before the eyes of the viewer.
Stereo photography was based on a long-k-nown phenomenon of vision: that the eyes receive two slightly different views of a scene, which the brain trans­lates into a single image having three dimensions. Thus a pair of pictures supplying slightly different views to each eye created the illusion of depth when seen through the stereoscope. Among the first to make a camera spe­cifically designed for the job was an English optical intrument maker named John B. Dancer, who in 1856 patented a device that took two pictures simultaneously through lenses set slightly apart. 
A box on a box, Dancer's device combines a stereo camera atop a platestoring magazine. The camera has two lenses mounted 2,5 inches apart, about the distance between the pupils of a person's eyes. In front of each lens is a revolving disk with holes of different diameters, one of which was selected to provide the aperture size needed for the correct exposure. In front of the disks is a doubleended paddle used as a shutter; turned by hand, it uncovered the lenses for focusing and taking picture . 

With Dancer's magazine-loading system the photographer could prepare the camera in advance for a series of stereo pictures by stacking 'plates in the arewer of the box below the camera. Once he·had tocusedhls subject on a ground-glass screen at the back of the camera, the ohotoqrephet replaced the screen with a plate-cflanging back (a). He then turned a knob (b) to operate a gear that moved the plate- carrying drawer iorwerd. As" a plate came into position, its number appeared in the window (c) on the camera's side. He lowered a rod (d), screwed it into a threaded hole (e) on the top of the plate and pulled the plate up into picture­taking position. After exposure was made the plate was lowered, the rod unscrewed and raised, and the drawer moved forward to bring a fresh plate into position for the next picture. 



Portraits Cheaper by the Dozen


Photographic portraits found instant popularity because they were much cheaper than painted ones, but even so they cost more than most people could afford. In 1854, however, a French photographer named Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi brought portraits within reach of practically everyone by inventing a new type of camera. Equipped with several lenses, it cut costs by taking as many as a dozen pictures on one 6,5 x 8,5 inch plate.
         Disderi's innovation went largely un­noticed until 1859, when the Emperor Napoleon III, about to embark for Italy, halted his troops in front of the photog­rapher's studio and went inside to have his portrait made by the new method. After word of this got around, Disderi suddenly found himself besieged by Parisians wanting their own portraits made. Within months, the rage for these tiny likenesses-called carles-de-visite because they were often left by visitors in place of printed calling cards -spread across France, England and the United States. To serve the seem­ingly insatiable demand, hundreds of studios throughout Europe and Ameri­ca were established, and photogra­phers competed to cut prices even more. The size of the individual por­traits got even smaller as photogra­phers devised ways to squeeze as many as 12 images on a single plate.
An early carte-de-visite camera had a focusing knob on each lens. Some cameras had lenses of different focal lengths so that views of different sizes, ranging from full-length to close-up, could be taken simultaneously. 


In a carte-de-visite print, shown before being cut into separate pictures, a young lady tries out six coy poses. They were taken with an improved camera that allowed the photographer to mask sections of the plate so that he could expose one view at a time. Thus the customer could strike several different poses for the price of one. 


The inventor of such tiny multiple portraits, Disderi-cenown above in one of his carte-de-visite photographs-became the Emperor's court photographer, made a fortune, spent it and died a pauper. 


Sunday, August 21, 2011

"The Mammoth"



During photography's early decades, enlargements were difficult and expen­sive to make and often turned out hope­lessly blurred. If you wanted big pic­tures you used a big camera. Many photographers had cameras that took 11 x 14-inch plates and larger and larg­er ones were built as the demand for big pictures grew. Among the first true giants was the one designed in 1858 by C. Thurston Thompson, an English photographer who specialized in repro­ducing works of art; his camera, a full 12 feet long, took photographs three feet square.
The largest camera of them all was built in the United States around 1900. Named the Mammoth, it was de­signed for officials of the Chicago and Alton Railroad Company, who wished to have a single, perfectly detailed por­trait of their newest luxury train. Having accomplished this feat, the Mammoth, like its prehistoric namesake, vanished, a victim of its own size and clumsiness. 
The Mammoth
Butterfield Camera 1929

Weighing a full 1,400 pounds when loaded with its 500-pound glass plate, the Mammoth was operated by a team of sometimes as many as 15 men. Built in Chicago, it was moved about on a specially designed railroad car; the developing and printing of one of its 4,5 x 8-foot photographs required 10 gallons of chemical solutions. The picture it was designed to take, of a luxury express train, so overwhelmed the judges at the 1900 Paris Exposition by its sheer size that it won the "Grand Prize of the World." 





Smaller Box, Brighter Image


One of photography's pioneers, an English country squire turned scientist named William Henry Fox Talbot, took a different route from that of Petzval to speed up picture taking. At first Talbot, like his contemporary Daguerre, had used a large camera obscura. But he found that an exposure of even one full hour in full sunlight often failed to get a picture. Then Talbot realized that tiny cameras, using lenses of short focal lengths, would be much faster. The light gathered would be concentrated on a small area rather than dispersed over a large one; the brighter image thus cast would be recorded faster by the weak photographic materials he was forced to use.
Talbot fitted microscope lenses-the most carefully made lenses produced up to that time-to the little cameras, which his wife dubbed "mousetraps." The cameras were very small indeed, as the photograph above indicates,
some of them measuring only 2,5 inches on a side. With one of these cameras, Talbot made his first successful photo­graph, a picture of a window in his manor house. The exposure time had been cut to a half hour, but the picture was so small-one inch square-that he dismissed it as looking like the work "of some Lilliputian artist." Lacking any means of enlarging his pictures, Talbot abandoned his mousetraps and concentrated his efforts on develop­ing photographic materials sensitive enough to work in larger, conventional cameras.
But the mousetraps he discarded were to become, nearly a century later and in a much more sophisticated form, the cameras most people used. For Tal­bot had the right idea: The key to speed in picture taking was a small camera whose short-focal-Iength lens made the most of dim light by concentrating it on a small piece of film. 

In this early photograph, taken in two parts and pieced together, Talbot and his assistants put on a busy show. Talbot himself prepares a camera to take a portrait of a waiting customer (the ring behind the sitter will serve to keep his head steady during the exposure). At left, an assistant copies a painting; at right, another photographs a statue. In the background a technician puts negatives on racks in the sun to make positive prints. At far right, the kneeling man holds a target for the taker of this photograph to focus on. 







Saturday, August 20, 2011

A Faster Lens to Freeze Motion



A cutaway diagram of Voigtlander's camera shows the Petzval lens (a) with its two groups of lens elements, each having. a convex and concave part. The photographer looked through a peephole (b) and focused by means of a ground-glass screen (c). Then he unscrewed the rear section of the camera and substituted a round sensitized plate (d) for the screen. 


The first cameras made do with the crude lenses inherited from the camera obscura-lenses that were adequate for the sensitive human eye but too lim­ited in light-gathering power to make photographs easily. Before photogra­phers could take clear pictures of ev­eryday scenes, they needed a lens mathematically designed for use in a camera. In January 1841 a maker of telescopes and other optical equipment, Voigtlander and Son, unveiled a camera-no modified camera obscura but a true photographic instrument -that was fitted with a lens designed by Josef Max Petzval, a 33-year-old professor of mathematics at the Univer­sity of Vienna. The camera, which un­derstandably turned out looking like a small telescope, used circular plates to record the full image projected by the lens. But it was the lens that mattered. It gathered 16 times more light than other types and made possible the re­cording of poorly lighted scenes and moving crowds capturing these difficult shots with remarkable clarity but with strange tints that were due not to the lens but to the crude chemicals then in use. 
The camera, a finely made instrument, was sold disassembled in an elegant wooden case. 


Viennese instrument maker Peter von Voigtlander, alert to photographers' demands for a fast lens and efficient camera, snapped up the new lens design brought to him by a mathematics professor, Josef Max Petzval. Voigtlander's technicians built the lens from Petzval's calculations and planned a camera especially for it.

 



Cameras That Made History (The Trailblazers)

One of America's first daguerreotypists, Jacob Byerly ,peers into the viewing screen of his camera, a plain box with a lens hardly changed from the centuries-old camera obscura. The group portrait at right, taken with a camera much like Byerly's, shows the lifelike detail characteristic of daguerreotypes. The smallest child, unable to hold still, appears blurred; the other figures are sharp, although no one appears to be enjoying the ordeal.

Portraits of Mrs. Kiah Sewall and Family, 1840

The daguerreotypes that introduced photography to the world in 1839 were amazingly sharp and detailed pictures despite the fact that they had been made in a crude camera. Daguerre had simply modified a portable camera ob­scura, the device artists had long used as a sketching aid, so that it would accept a light-sensitive plate.
While Daguerre's invention was ac­claimed as miraculous, its limitations soon became obvious. The combina­tion of poor lenses and slow-acting chemicals required exposures of up to 20 minutes in bright sunlight before an image could be recorded in the cam­era. Scoffers predicted that photogra­phy would never get beyond the novelty stage. But in scarcely more than a year they were being proved wrong. Thanks to improvements in light-sensitive com­pounds and a few optical innovations, exposures could be made in less than two minutes. Customers were soon flocking to newly established daguerreotype studios-on the conti­nent, in Britain and, before long, in the United States-where, with the aid of headrests and arm supports, they tried to hold still for the camera. 

The Wolcott camera (top), proudly emblazoned with the name of its inventor, American optical designer Alexander S. Wolcott, cut exposure time to about 90 seconds in sunlight by gathering light with a large concave mirror, which produced a brighter image than any available lens. Light entered the camera through a large hole (a) and struck the highly polished mirror (b), which concentrated the rays and reflected them onto a viewing screen (c) held in a frame by a clip (d): To focus, the photographer looked through a door (e) and moved the frame's support (f) to sharpen the image. He then substituted a plate for the screen. 

A front view of Alexander S. Wolcott's mirror camera (top), patented in 1840, shows the circular light-admitting hole, the rectangular plate holder and the curved reflecting mirror behind it. Typical of the tiny pictures this type of camera took is the one above, now badly deteriorated, of Henry Fitz, a telescope maker who helped Wolcott build a larger camera of similar design. Although Wolcott's mirror instruments made serviceable pictures, they soon became obsolete as lens design improved.








Friday, August 19, 2011

From Camera Obscura to Instamatic


Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura
Many artists of the 17th and 18th Centuries used a camera obscura for precise preliminary sketches for paintings of landscapes, buildings and even portraits. The portable model shown above worked exactly like the modern reflex camera. Light entering through the lens was reflected by an angled mirror inside the box; the mirror projected a riqnt-side-uo image on the ground-glass screen at the top, which was shielded from surrounding light by a folding hood. The artist placed a thin piece of paper on the glass and traced the image, achieving perfect perspective with a minimum of effort.
Instamatic Camera

The camera, oddly enough, was invented many centuries before pho­tography. In the form of the camera obscura, it projected a view of an out­door scene into a darkened room, directing light rays from the scene through a small hole in one wall to form an image on the opposite wall. Dur­ing the 11th Century a number of Arabian scientist-philosophers were amus­ing themselves with camera obscuras made out of tents. In the late 15th Century Leonardo da Vinci described the "dark chamber" in knowledg­able detail.
When one of Leonardo's countrymen, a Neapolitan scientist and writer named Giovanni Battista della Porta, became interested in camera ob­scuras toward the end of the 16th Century, he reacted as millions of am­ateurs have ever since: he got a camera of his own. He experimented with a lens to sharpen the image and then invited some of his friends in for a show. Seating them in the room facing away from the aperture, he un­capped the lens. On the wall could be seen a group of actors hired to play a little drama outside. Della Porta's guests, unhappily, were not amused by his motion picture show; the sight of tiny human forms ca­vorting upside down on a dark wall sent them into panic. Not long after, their host was brought before a Papal court on a charge of sorcery; he some­how wriggled out of the trouble, but found it prudent to leave the country for a while.
By the end of the 17th Century camera obscuras were serving practical ends. They were made in the form of movable chambers and sedan chairs so that artists could carry them around, get inside, and trace land­scapes and cathedrals in accurate perspective, using translucent paper placed over a ground-glass viewing screen. One of the first fully portable models was designed by Johann Zahn, a German monk. Zahn's camera, a wooden box nine inches high and two feet long, had not only a lens that could be moved in and out in a tube to focus the image, but an ad­justable aperture to control the amount of light entering the box and a mir­ror that cast the image, right side up, onto a translucent screen on top so that it could be viewed from outside the box. Zahn's device was identical in principle with the modern single-lens reflex camera and had he had some kind of light-sensitive plate to put into it he would have invented photography.
However, virtually nothing was known about photographic chemicals at the time and it was not until 1826 that a French lithographer-inventor, Jo­seph Nicephore Nlepce, applied recent discoveries about light-sensitive compounds and finally supplied the missing element. Niepcs coated a sheet of pewter with an asphalt solution, inserted it in an artist's camera ob­scura much like Zahn's and placed it on his windowsill. After an exposure of eight hours he succeeded in making the world's first photograph: a dim, fuzzy image of his farmyard in central France.
After some years of effort, Niepce joined forces with a Parisian scenery designer and impresario, Louis Jacques Mande Oaguerre. Like Niepce, Oa­guerre did little to improve the camera, but he did find more sensitive chem­icals. In 1839, after Niepce's death, he announced the first practical photographic process to the world. His daguerreotypes, which took ex­posures of about half an hour to produce, were surprisingly sharp. But he could photograph only still lifes, buildings and landscapes; people simply could not hold still long enough for their images to be recorded.
At the announcement of Oaguerre's breakthrough, one of the men pres­ent, an Austrian professor named Andreas von Ettingshausen, immedi­ately recognized the problem: the crude lens Oaguerre was using was far too inefficient in gathering light (by modern standards, it had a speed of about f/17). On his return home, von Ettingshausen reported this news to his friend and colleague Josef Max Petzval, a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna; he also introduced Petzval to Peter von Voigt­lander, head of. a prestigious family optical firm. It took nearly a year for Petzval to compute the design of a new lens and have it properly made, but the result was worth the effort. Built into a special camera made for it by voigtlander, it admitted nearly 16 times as much light as Oaguerre's (its speed was about f/3.6) and reduced exposures to less than a minute.
Petzval's lens was to be the photographer's standard for 60 years thereafter. Known everywhere as "the German lens," it turned photography from a novelty into a practical craft. Thousands were produced by Voigt­lander for use in his own and other cameras; and other entrepreneurs in Eu­rope and America made many more thousands of copies. Voiqtlander soon built a second factory in Germany to handle the demand, helping to lay the cornerstone of the German photographic industry. By then, how­ever, Petzval had quarreled with his partner, contending that he had not been properly rewarded for his achievement, and the two men split up. Al­though Petzval was honored later as one of the founders of photography,he died a lonely and embittered man.
The camera in which Petzval's lens was most often used was the large and heavy view camera employed by nearly all professionals and am­ateurs through most of the 19th Century, but now seldom seen outside the studio. It was a tripod-mounted wooden box, with another box sliding in­side it like a tight-fitting drawer (later replaced by a flexible leather bel­lows) to move the lens back and forth for focusing. The photographer adjusted focus while looking at the image on a ground-glass screen in the back; the screen was removed and replaced with a plate holder for pic­ture taking.
With the introduction of faster plates in the late 1870s, the camera needed a new element: a mechanical shutter that could dependably produce expo­sures in fractions of a second. The first shutters were not built inside the camera, but were accessories that the photographer fitted over the front of his lens. One, the "guillotine," or drop shutter, was the essence of simplicity: a sliding board with a rectangular hole in it. When the photographer released the shutter, the board dropped, letting light pass through to the lens during the instant the rectangle moved past. Rigged with rubber bands, this type of shutter permitted photographers like Eadweard Muybridge to stop a horse in mid-gallop with speeds of close to 1/S00 second. The first focal-plane shutter, which operated like the guillotine but had an opening of adjustable size, was used by a British photographer named William England as early as 1861. The other main type, the leaf shutter, was first introduced by Edward Bausch in 1887.
By the 1880s a variety of ingenious special-purpose cameras also ap­peared: giant cameras to produce giant prints (enlarging was still imprac­tical); multi-lens cameras that could record many small, inexpensive por­traits on a single plate; stereo cameras that created an illusion of three dimensions; panoramic cameras that took in broad views. But all of these devices were still too unwieldy and expensive for most amateurs. Also, with few exceptions they still involved the loading, un­loading and developing of one plate at a time. Then, in 1888, a single event launched photography on its way to becoming a hobby for everyone: George Eastman, a former bookkeeper in a Rochester, New York bank, announced his Kodak No.1, the first true hand-held camera designed to use roll film.
The Kodaks were aimed at the snapshot market; the dream of a small yet versatile camera for serious photography was still unfulfilled. In the spring of 1925, however, a handy little camera was displayed at the Leipzig Fair. Made by the German optical works of E. Leitz, it was called the Leica (from "LEitz CAmera"); it used a roll of 3Smm film to provide 36 exposures; it had a fast focal-plane shutter and a high-quality f/3.S lens.
The Leica had started as a gleam in the eye of Oskar Barnack, head of Leitz's experimental department, some 20 years before. Barnack, whose health was poor, was nevertheless an avid hiker and amateur photographer and liked to pursue his pastimes O,n Sundays in the Thuringian Forest. After panting up and down hills with his S x 7 view camera and a suitcase full of equipment, he began to dream of a camera he could simply put in his pocket or sling from his shoulder. Barnack’s idea –“kleines Neqativ, grosses Bild" ("small negative, large picture") started to take shape. At first he tried cut­ting his 5 x 7 plates into small pieces and usinq them in an experimental cam­era, but the tiny negatives were too coarse to produce decent enlargements. Later, when he started working for Leitz on a motion-picture camera, he thought of using that camera's film, which was specially prepared to record fine detail in a small negative.
The film made the difference and the Leica in its later form set the stan­dard for the modern hand camera that could take almost any kind of picture under almost any conditions. One lever advanced the film and wound up the mechanism of the focal-plane shutter, which could give any of a range of ex­posures from one second to 1/1000 second. The extremely fast lens (now f/1.9) permitted picture taking indoors without special lighting and a range­finder mechanically connected to the lens provided accurate focusing. Most important, the camera was so small and simple to use that it could be taken anywhere and operated without fuss.
Barnack's Leica revolutionized photography. Along with similar precision cameras like the Ermanox (page 164) it became the new tool of photojour­nalists as well as an increasing number of amateurs, who prized its ability to catch unposed, natural pictures. And in turn such photographers began to support an ever-growing market for other types of small, versatile cameras, each with its own distinctive advantages. The twin-lens reflex, which en­abled the photographer to focus through a separate lens coupled to the tak­ing lens, was made popular by the introduction of the Rolleiflex in 1927; and in 1937 the Exacta provided a versatile small camera that could be easily fo­cused through the taking lens, the 35mm single-lens reflex.
These and subsequent developments in fine cameras have been spectac­ular enough, but the real camera explosion has come since World War II with. the astonishing success of two families of cameras for the amateur: the Ko­dak Instamatics and similar "do-everything-for-you" cameras of other man­ufacturers, and the Polaroid Land Cameras, named for Edwin H. Land, in­ventor of the first successful in-the-camera developing process. (Land was inspired to create the picture-in-a-minute camera by his small daughter:
When he was taking snapshots of her one day, she impatiently asked how soon she could see them and was heartbroken when he explained about the delay involved in developing and printing.) Both these families of modern cameras give the photographer the sim­plicity that won amateurs to George Eastman's first Kodak. Film magazines snap into place so that there is no threadihg. Light-sensitive devices gauge illumination and automatically set shutter or aperture for exposure. Fine fo­cusing must still be done by the human eye-but the inventors are working on that problem too.
Petzval's Lens (Voigtlander)

Petzval's Lens (Voigtlander)

Petzval's Lens (Voigtlander)

Petzval's Lens (Voigtlander)

Voigtlander Modern

Voigtlander Modern

Voigtlander Modern












Thursday, August 18, 2011

A View from beyond Our World

FRANK BORMAN for NASA = Earth Rise as Seen from Apollo 1968
Just before Christmas 1968, the world watched enthralled as the spacecraft Apollo 8 sped toward its rendezvous with the moon. On board the craft, in turn, astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell watched the earth, photographing it as it shrank into the distance. It was the first time that men had moved far enough out in space to see their own planet as a ce­lestial body-a marbled sphere of clouds, land and sea.
        The photograph at the right, taken by Borman with a Hasselblad fitted with a 250mm telephoto lens, shows the earth as it appeared from a distance of a quarter of a million miles, rising above the surface of the moon. Later the pic­ture would be carried on television, re­produced in thousands of newspapers and magazines, even made into a Unit­ed States postage stamp. Viewing it, earth-bound men shared with the astro­nauts a measure of their awe and a sense of man's insignificance in the vastness of space

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Body's Wonders


Photographers, using special equip­ment and techniques, have been able to make visible many marvels of the human body. Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson is one; he worked closely with doctors over a period of years to make an extraordinary series ot photographs that trace the devel­opment of the human embryo. The pho­tograph at right shows an 11-week-old fetus only moments after its mother miscarried. The blood-rich placental mass, here partially cut away to re­veal the two-and-one-half-inch long fetus curled within, was suspended by Nilsson in a clear fluid so that he could photograph it in as close an ap­proximation of the natural state as pos­sible. Whereas a similar fetus pre­served as a specimen in a laboratory bottle would repel most beholders, Nilsson's painstaking technique has lent an awesome beauty to this view of life at its beginning.
In the picture opposite, research sci­entist Don Ross used a process called multispectral analysis to make a re­markable contour map of the human skull showing contrasts of bone and tis­sue that the eye would otherwise miss. He converted shades of gray into shades of color, turning an ordinary X-ray of a human skull into a stunning pattern of many hues that simplified interpretation of the X-ray.




photo by LENNART NILSSON