Black & White Portrait Of Baby, By Studio Grand, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Black and White Portrait Of Baby, By Studio Grand Garfield Place N.E COR 8th and Race, Cincinnati, Ohio.
An Added Tidbit
Before photography was created, people had figured out the basic principles of lenses and the camera. They could project the image on the wall or piece of paper, however, no printing was possible at the time, recording light turned out to be a lot harder than projecting it. The instrument that people used for processing pictures was called the Camera Obscura (which is Latin for the darkroom) and it was around for a few centuries before photography came along.
It is believed that Camera Obscura was invented around 13-14th centuries, however, there is a manuscript by an Arabian scholar Hassan ibn Hassan dated the 10th century that describes the principles on which camera obscura works and on which analogue photography is based today.
Camera Obscura is essentially a dark, closed space in the shape of a box with a hole on one side of it. The hole has to be small enough in proportion to the box to make the camera obscura work properly. The light coming in through a tiny hole transforms and creates an image on the surface that it meets, like the wall of the box. The image is flipped and upside down, however, which is why modern analogue cameras have made use of mirrors.
In the mid 16th century, Giovanni Battista Della Porta, an Italian scholar, wrote an essay on how to use camera obscura to make the drawing process easier. He projected the image of people outside the camera obscura on the canvas inside of it (camera obscura was a rather big room in this case) and then drew over the image or tried to copy it.
The process of using the camera obscura looked very strange and frightening for the people at those times. Giovanni Battista had to drop the idea after he was arrested and prosecuted on a charge of sorcery.
Even though only a few of the Renaissance artists admitted they used camera obscura as an aid in drawing, it is believed most of them did. The reason for not openly admitting it was the fear of being charged with association with occultism or simply not wanting to admit something many artists called cheating.
Today we can state that camera obscura was a prototype of the modern photo camera. Many people still find it amusing and use it for artistic reasons or simply for fun.
Item Code - VIS12E57A24REA
Width: 5 1/8" Height: 8 1/4” Depth: 1/8" Weight: 26 g
