For our first class, we went through the history of photography and the development of the modern-day camera. We looked at the first photograph made by Joseph Niépce in 1826, the first photo of a person by Louis Daguerre, and the first portrait by Henry Fox Talbot and discussed each of these men's individual contribution to photography: the photographic process itself; the Daguerreotype; and the calotype or forefather to the modern negative.
We looked at the evolution of cameras starting with camera obscura (see video below): the view camera and the cumbersome process used all photographers until 1879 with the invention of dry plate negatives and later with the release of the Kodak box camera in 1888, then the Brownie in 1900; handheld large-format cameras like the Speed Graphic favored by photographers like Weegee and Margaret Bourke White; the Leica, a 35mm rangefinder camera favored by Henri Cartier-Bresson; Polaroids; the Single Lense Reflex or SLR; digital cameras; cell phone cameras; and the modern day advanced digital cameras.
As I noted, with the examples of famous modern-day "amateur" photograpsh from Janis Krums (Miracle on the Hudson or Tweet Heard Around the World) and more recently the photographs of a low-flying plane in New York below by Jim Brown) that put many in the city on edge.
We looked at United States Civil War-era photographer Matthew Brady and at Ansel Adams, and were introduced briefly to f-stops, or apertures, and shutter speeds.
Links
Daguerreotype Gallery
Photo by Jim Brown
The White House Photo
