adrian k workman photography

You may download images in the "Royalty Free" section for FREE for personal use, but please note these photographs cannot be used for compiling onto another website, and AKWP retains ownership of the copyright of all photos and images, published on and downloaded from this web site.

A Short History of Photography

Since ancient times people have reproduced images using light through what was called a Camera Obscura.

A pencil of light through a pin hole would create an image formation on a darkened wall. The origination of the word Photography comes from the Greek, Photos ("Light") and Graphein ("To Draw").

The word photography was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839, described as a method of recording images by the action of light.

It wasn't until the 16th Century that clarity and brightness was achieved in a Camera Obscura by inserting a telescope lens in the hole and then projecting it onto a flat surface.

By the 17th Century Camera Obscuras were in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form on Sedan chairs.

1727 saw a Professor Schulze accidentally creating the first photo-sensitive compound, when mixing chalk, nitric acid and silver in a flask and then noticing that the side exposed to the sunlight, darkened. In 1800 Thomas Wedgwood made "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather that had been coated with silver nitrate. The resulting images quickly faded when exposed to strong light.

A Frenchman named Nicéphore Niépce in 1816 combined the camera obscura with photo sensitive paper which he placed in the back of the camera, although it produced an image it quickly turned black once exposed to light. In 1826 he was able to create a permanent image and became the inventor of photography.

In 1834 Henry Fox Talbot of Laycock Abbey, created the permanent negative image using silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. He was able to create positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper.

Laycock Abbey, Nr Chippenham, Wiltshire, was the location for films, Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice, and where Fox Talbot took his first photo of a leaded window, which can still be seen today.

Another Frenchman named Louis Daguerre in 1837 created images on silver plated copper, coated with silver iodide and developed with warm mercury. This was named the Daguerreotype process. The French government awarded him a state pension in return for publishing the methods and rights for other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process.

These people were the pioneers of photography as we know it today and as we go into another era of photography called digital.

Bringing us nearer to present time a software company in1990 introduced "Adobe Photoshop" which enabled photographers of all levels to reproduce images on a computer that would have been done originally in a photographic darkroom.

Shortly afterwards in1991 Kodak brought out the first digital SLR camera called DCS-100 which was a modified Nikon F3.

Things have moved very fast since then in the photo digital age with the first camera phone introduced in 2000 by Sharp of Japan. With prices dropping as manufacturers flood the market with digital cameras, Kodak stopped the production of film cameras in 2004.

With cameras becoming smaller and producing better results, more and more images of life in the 21st Century are being recorded.