المصورون الأوائل - ٢ - تاريخ التصوير الضوئي .. كتاب التصوير الضوئي

The first photographers - 2 - History of photography .. The book of photography

The idea spread in Europe and the German professor Athanasius Kirchherr left us a description of a dark room he saw in Germany. Kirchherr's drawing shows a building the size of a small hut, light enough to be carried by two people, one of whom is the artist who enters this hut through an opening at the bottom. Such a model was probably intended for large-scale scenes because twenty years earlier a smaller and lighter room in the form of a tent was used. The English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton was amazed by a picture of a landscape that the German astronomer Johannes Kepler had drawn in 1620 inside a (little black tent).

Then the dark rooms developed in terms of shape and size. Some were placed above the painter or in a chair with tripods, while the most important rooms were carried under the arm. Even Gaspar Schott, one of Kirchherr's students, made a box-shaped dark room based on a model he saw in Spain in 1657. The chamber contained two lenses and the distance was adjusted by sliding one box inside the other. In England, Robert Boyle demonstrated a box chamber where the image appeared through a semi-transparent oiled sheet. The same idea was used by the German mathematician Johann Sturm in 1676, but he added a mirror at an angle of 455 to show the image in its natural form, i.e. not inverted, and he also added a black cover to improve visibility, as is the case today with the black cover. Sturm's machine was the first portable reflector. The monk Johann Zahne made some further improvements to it a century later, replacing the oiled sheet with a sanded glass and also adding a telescopic lens consisting of a convex and a concave lens to change the size of the image. Thus, physicists could no longer improve on this, since the black chamber was complete in this respect: chemists had to play the next role.

The machine that makes the profile images (profiles):

The photographer draws the contours and lines of the profile reflected from a candle on a screen placed behind the girl. Goethe, a distinguished profiler, helped invent the basic machine.

The darkroom, Fox Talbot's box: The darkroom was in use when Fox Talbot tried in 1830 to produce a permanent photograph with this machine. He obtained his famous picture in 1835 (View from the window of Lacoq Abbey) (see page 22).

The darkroom inside: A model of the darkroom in the form of a table helped to work inside. It is a large, heavy machine designed for painting still subjects. This painting from 1769 by Georg Brander shows a Rococo-style darkroom-table equipped with a device for calibrating close-up models, i.e. close-up subjects.