"Only a transparent film covered her exposed breast." Sign in old photo shop.
A friend of mine was searching for large sheets of film to use in some photo etchings. The photo shop that sold it to them before was out the film and said that it was no longer being produced. As a matter of fact, the manufacturer had to destroy all of its remaining stock due to tax reasons.
Now only some 100 years after the invention of film, we are destroying it! It is useless. Why? Well...Digital Photos! Or better put: digital imaging.
Film came about as an evolution from the early 1800's (actually it began several years earlier) when they used metal plates for images and later glass plates, with silver nitrate on them to produce negatives. The first contraptions took 8 hours or so of exposure to get an image and then it was difficult to make the image stay around. Finally they got the exposure down to about a minute and the image stabilized so one could keep it. That was the beginning of photography.
That is, if you could hold still for a couple of minutes, you had a photo portrait. Being difficult to make and rare, these photographs were in high regard in those days. Today some of these are regarded as fine art photography and are collectors art.
A chap named Daguerre made this process usable and gave the patent rights to the French government. This process, essentially a metal photograph, did not last long and glass plates came into use as negatives, after photo sensitive paper was invented. This began the negative-photo paper printing method of photography around the mid 1800's. Today this process is all but obsolete.
Along about civil war time the glass plates became mainstream and we have some good photos of the civil war by Matthew Brady and also pictures of him and his portable darkroom. Some of the existing photos of this era and later are actually quite exquisite and some say, cannot be duplicated and considered as fine art photography.
Things developed along until the late 1800's, when cellulose film was brought into production by Mr. Eastman. He figured out how to put paper on the back of the film and roll that on spindles to keep it from being exposed. Then, kaboom! Roll film was invented.
Roll film? What is that, you say? Well that is what really made photo making portable, fun and easy. Mr. Eastman made these little boxes that you put the spindle with the rolled up film in. Then you hook the end of the film to another spool, close the box and roll the film on the empty spool as you took pictures.
These contraptions were drastically simple. At first there was only a hole for the light to come through and expose the film, but later glass lens were introduced. The shutters were manual and a lever was pushed by thumb and the exposure time depended on how long you left your thumb on the shutter.
Now every loving husband could take a picture of his wife in hoop skirts.
In the early 1900's the cassette, or metal container, was developed and from this the 35 MM range finder camera came into use. Later in the mid 1900's the 35 MM single lens reflex camera was developed. These formats, with the ability to see through the taking lens, still exist in the digital world, but in body form only. The image recording mechanics are gone. This is the form of camera that almost any serious photographer today prefers, if they can afford it.
Now back to the sheet film which is all but obsolete today. It is thick and flat so that it can slide into light proof holders. This became the favorite of professionals and serious art photographers in early 1900's and on to the 1950's when film and lens technology began to make these cumbersome formats, some as large as 11x14 inches and even larger, somewhat obsolete and now they are virtually gone except for a few crazed fanatics.
Wade Swicord spent some fifteen years as an architectural photographer. He stopped looking at buildings and started building them and now lives in Chattanooga, TN. For some very excellent free instruction on how to use Photoshop, do click on http://photoexpertshop.com/ Photoshop has taken the classic darkroom talent out of picture making and made it into an entirely new art form. You will learn new ways to use Photoshop in the five free videos and will be inspired to be quite creative.
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