المصورون الأوائل - ١ - تاريخ التصوير الضوئي .. كتاب التصوير الضوئي

Early Photographers - 1 - History of Photography.. Book of Photography

Prevent daylight from leaking into a room while allowing a beam of light to enter through a hole with a diameter equal to that of a pencil. Place a sheet of white paper approximately 20 cm away and perpendicular to the opening: the external view is drawn on the paper and gives an inverted, unclear but well-defined image. This method of forming images (stenopia) was first mentioned by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. It was later known under the name "obscura", a term introduced by the Italians and meaning (dark room).

Since light can form images, it is possible that the natural laws related to the art of photography were observed long ago by primitive man. Prehistoric man lived in small stone caves that worked as a natural black room. A beam of light leaking through a crack between two stones forms a spectrum on the opposite wall or on the ground: a spectrum or images of trees, images of people outside or even an image of the sun. The inverted image added to the mystery of this phenomenon at a time when most aspects of life were mysterious and questionable.

The Portable Black Room:
The German professor Athanasius Kirchherr saw a dark room while traveling in Germany in 1640. He drew it for the magazine "Grand Arts" in 1646 (above). The room was the size of a small hut but light enough to be carried by two people, most likely one of whom was the painter who entered through a crack at the bottom. It was made of wood with canvas walls. There was a second box inside with semi-transparent faces on which the artist drew the lines of the inverted images displayed on it (left).

Advanced Darkroom:

This room-tent (circa 1820) carried on three legs includes a double-concave lens and a reflective mirror at the head.
The image is reflected downward as if the artist is drawing it on a horizontal plane.

Since ancient times, people have noticed the observed phenomena such as the silhouette that the sun's rays draw on a rocky area at sunset and have noticed the precision in drawing things on a flat surface. They have undoubtedly noticed that the silhouette of some things remains recorded. On the substrate if rays are directed at them.

Strong sun: A section of a leaf on the peel of a ripe apple is an example among many examples. You can touch this phenomenon if you put anything, such as a key, on a piece of paper and put them under the sun's rays for a period of time. When you move the keys, you notice that their lines have been drawn on the paper.

The first major phase in the history of photography begins with the use of the camera obscura by Italian artists in the 16th century, and perhaps the most famous painters of the Italian Renaissance used it. This was certainly the case with Guardi and Canaletto in their Venetian landscapes. Leonardo da Vinci saw the potential of the camera obscura in 1490 when he recommended observing the illuminated scenes of external objects formed in a dark room by sunlight passing through a hole in the wall of the room. Over the next fifty years, Jerome Cardin introduced the optical lens in 1550, which was used to correct errors of vision. These lenses were convex on both sides. A second improvement on the principle was the introduction of the diaphragm, believed to have been invented by Daniele Barbaro in 1530. These two mechanisms (lens and pupil) were added to the darkroom to increase the clarity of the images.

When artists understood that the darkroom could help them solve the problem of the difficult return of perspective and to capture the similarity between scenes and objects on a two-dimensional surface, they began to think about obtaining a portable darkroom. The development of the portable darkroom is the basic stage that led to the photographic machine that includes the basic elements, the lens, the pupil, and the surface on which the image is formed.