An evening at Burton Photographic Society

I joined the BPS this year and on 14th October two members Terry Middleton and Ralph Ducket gave us a talk and picture show aimed at newer members of the club.   Terry started the session by going through a brief history of the camera, where it started to where we are today which was interesting as I knew little about the history.   These are my notes from the evening. 


Around 1888 George Eastman developed a camera into which he loaded a light sensitive paper known as film (copy of camera below taken from http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventors/ss/George_Eastman.htm).   This man later created the company known today as Kodak.  The camera was an automatic and did everything for you, you just had to point and shoot.   He also created the "Box Brownie".  

 In the 1970s colour photographs emerged followed by the invention of the SLR camera..  This invention meant that it was a good idea to know how the camera worked as it was up to the user to 'tell' the camera what to do as opposed to just pressing a button.  Terry went on then to talk about the 5 basic settings on an SLR; he also said there are many functions on SLRs that you may not need or ever use. He said he had gone through his manual and highlighted everything he would use.


William Henry Fox Talbot created a camera using camera obscura but had a lens cap and light sensitive paper at the back of his camera (which was a box).   He would take the camera out to his chosen location, remove the lens cap and expose the paper to light, put the lens cap back on, and return to his studio.  He would remove the paper and develop it.    He noticed that the pictures were unsharp and distorted due to the edge of the lens.  He therefore put a metal plate over the lens to cover the edges.   He called this a stop - it removed the blurring on the pictures.  By doing this, he discovered other advantages; the amount of light that the paper was exposed to was less.  He then made further metal plates each with the hole half the size as the previous one.  The smaller the stops were getting the less light was exposed onto the paper.   The invention of the Iris diaphragm set aperture without physical metal stops.  The shutter was later invented to cope with time. Since listening to Terry, I have gained more information on the history of photography and know that the following people played key parts in getting to where we are today (this list is not exhaustive):


Aristosle (4th Century BC),  Leondardo da Vince (AD1490), Robert Boyle (17th Century), Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1827), Louie Dagueere (1829), Frederick Scott Archer (1851), Ernst Leitz (1925), Thomas Sutton.


I have not set out what each of them did as this is not required, however I felt it important to include it as what I learnt in the club was only part of the history.