Images--Magical Images

Images—Magical Images

Yesterday, my wife Carrie and I were talking about photography and what has happened with the art of capturing images. The more we talked, the more I thought about all the changes I have seen in the past 75 years.

The desire to capture images is as old as early humans. Most of us are familiar with the cave drawings Lascaux, France. These paintings are about 10,000 years old. Even older drawings have been found in Chauvet Cave, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France. These images may be as much as 32,000 years old. Most of these paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns. Drawings of humans are not often found and those that do exist are more cartoon-like than actual depictions of a person. These are our earliest evidence of the human desire to capture images of the things surrounding them.

Photography, as we know it, began with curosity about light and how we could possibly capture it. The Chinese were the first to describe the concept of pinhole cameras which came before the camera obscura. The Chinese philosopher Mozi/Mo-Ti/Mo-Tzu/Mo Jing (470BC-390BC) mentioned upside down images that resulted from light coming through a pinhole. Aristotle wrote about a similar phenomonon, but Ibyn al-Haytham, a 10th-century Arab physicist, astronomer and mathematician wrote about the concept in his Book of Optics in 1021 AD. He also was the inventor of the camera obscura.

The camera obscura is still around today and can be found in many places in the world. Carrie and I have been to the one in Edinburgh, Scotland and enjoyed the view of downtown Edinburgh. These cameras were not designed to permanently capture an image—that was to come later when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent images in 1827. Others, notably Louis Daguerre (the Daguerreotype) and William Fox Talbot improved on the process. Talbot eventually developed a process for making negatives which would allow repeated reproduction of a captured image.

Mathew Brady brought photography to the battlefield during the Civil War. His photographs of war dead shocked Americans as to the reality of war. With the exception of William Henry Harrison, Brady managed to photograph all the presidents from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley. One of his photographs of Abraham Lincoln found its way onto the five dollar bill.

But it was George Eastman, founder of Kodak, who took photography out of the hands of professionals and put it into the hands of everyday Americans. His development of “roll film” did away with the cumbersome process of producing plates to capture images. Inexpensive cameras became available with the introduction of the Brownie camera in 1900. The camera sold for $1.00 and a roll of film was fifteen cents. For many years, Kodak not only sold film, but the price included its development, a set of prints and a new roll of film. My earliest recollections are of these “box” cameras—only one speed with a fixed focus. You had to load and unload the film in a dark room. When all the pictures had been taken, the film was sent off to Kodak.

The next major evolution in photography was the introduction of “instant cameras” that satisfied our craving to see the photographs now—not wait for a week or so before they were available. Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, developed this camera in 1947. Just over 60 years later, Polaroid stopped producing film. But the push for “instant” photography had its impetus with Land’s invention.

Although Kodak and others toyed with digital photography, commercially available cameras didn’t come along until 1990. And in 1991, Kodak brought out a digital camera that cost an amaxing $13,000. In less than two decades, film cameras have become the photography dinosaurs. Today, digital cameras are ubiquitous and come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Pictures are “instant” and generally can be viewed on a small liquid crystal display (LCD) screen that is an integral part of the camera and may often be used as ther “view finder”. The new “film” is a digital card that can be removed from the camera, plugged into a computer and pictures can be downloaded, edited, printed and sent around the world electronically via the internet. Cameras may also be plugged directly into a computer to download photographs. Instead of storing paper based photographs in books, it is now possible to store them on small digital cards or on mass storage devices that are only slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. These external “hard drives” come in many sizes—measured in “bytes”. A 500 megabyte (that’s 500,000,000 bytes) drive can store approximately 140,000 photographs. An affordable 1 terabyte (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) external hard is available and takes up little more space that that same deck of playing cards. It is hard to imagine how much can be stored on something this size, but a 10 terabyte drive would hold all the printed material now available in the Library of Congress.

Where does it end? I have no idea. I believe that some day we will be able to capture images that left this earth millions of years ago. Theoretically, these images still exist, travelling out from the earth in to the great void of the universe. Of course, this means we will have to be able to move faster than the speed of light, but that may well be possible if we don’t destroy ourselves before then. If this does happen, we finally will be able to see how we evolved, why the dinosaurs died out, where all the great religious leaders, Christ, Buddah, Mohammed lived and taught. We will be able to view all the great philosphers teaching. The great warriors will spring to life and we will witness the death of Julius Caesar. We can watch the great pyramids being built stone by stone and follow Moses and the Jews as they wander in the wilderness. We will follow the Wise men as they follow the star to Bethlehem. We will see Christ throw the money changers out of the temple, his temptations and sufferings in the garden, Judas's betrayal and the nails driven into Christ. The mystery of the resurrections will be answered and Thomas will be seen feeling Christ's wounds.

The best is yet to come.

I could not have done this without the help of Wikipedia and many sites on the internet. The power of all of this is amazing.