Photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photolithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure.
With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically "developed" into a visible image, either negative or positive, depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.

Etymology

The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtós), genitive of φῶς (phōs), "light" and γραφή (graphé) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light".Several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Hércules Florence, a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, Brazil, used the French form of the word, photographiecode: fra promoted to code: fr , in private notes which a Brazilian historian believes were written in 1834. This claim is widely reported but is not yet largely recognized internationally. The first use of the word by Florence became widely known after the research of Boris Kossoy in 1980.The German newspaper Vossische Zeitungcode: deu promoted to code: de of 25 February 1839 contained an article entitled Photographiecode: deu promoted to code: de , discussing several priority claims – especially Henry Fox Talbot's – regarding Daguerre's claim of invention. The article is the earliest known occurrence of the word in public print. It was signed "J.M.", believed to have been Berlin astronomer Johann von Maedler. The astronomer John Herschel is also credited with coining the word, independent of Talbot, in 1839.The inventors Nicéphore Niépce, Talbot, and Louis Daguerre seem not to have known or used the word "photography", but referred to their processes as "Heliography" (Niépce), "Photogenic Drawing"/"Talbotype"/"Calotype" (Talbot), and "Daguerreotype" (Daguerre).

History

Precursor technologies

Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, relating to seeing an image and capturing the image. The discovery of the camera obscura ("dark chamber" in Latin) that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) also invented a camera obscura as well as the first true pinhole camera. The invention of the camera has been traced back to the work of Ibn al-Haytham. While the effects of a single light passing through a pinhole had been described earlier, Ibn al-Haytham gave the first correct analysis of the camera obscura, including the first geometrical and quantitative descriptions of the phenomenon, and was the first to use a screen in a dark room so that an image from one side of a hole in the surface could be projected onto a screen on the other side.
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