Let Us Help You Fall In Love With Photography!

I’ve never been very good at photography- most of my takes have just about enough creativity in them to become boring generic postcards, and my framing skills are just off enough to keep me from starting my own boring generic postcard business. But the fact that I am completely and utterly mediocre at one of my favorite hobbies, despite all the fancy techy equipment I have for both my digital and analogue failures, makes me love it and appreciate it even more.

I used to think of photography as a sort of magic, because how else would you turn light into images, and single shots in stories? I did it a great injustice at that, because it is so much more awesome than just silly old magic, and here’s just five reasons why:

1. The word photography literally means drawing with light. It comes from Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), “light” and γραφή (graphé) “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”. So every time you grab your phone or a camera, and snap something even as art-free as a selfie, you’re harnessing light to create an image. Let that sink in.

2. Photography is the practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation- chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film, or electronically through an image sensor. Hence, photography is equal parts art, science and technology, and when it comes to the latter we’ve come such a long way in such short time.

The first digital camera was created only a few decades ago, in 1975, by Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. The camera weighed 8 pounds, recorded 0.01 megapixel black and white photos (how does your phone camera seem now? Amazing?) and it took 23 seconds to create the first photograph. Now we photograph galaxies. Just saying.

3. Drawing with light dates back to 5th century BCE, long before the first cameras were made. The first mention of photograph-esque techniques is the pinhole camera, described by Chinese philosopher Mo Di and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid. Pinhole camera is actually a lenseless camera, or to be quite frank, a light-proof box with a small hole in one side, which allows light from a scene to pass through a single point and project an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.

Then came the camera obscura, a pinhole upgraded with some lenses and mirrors that inverted the inverted image. This handy gadget was used by some of the greatest painters like Vermeer to put things in perspective. Literally. It was only in 1827 that Joseph Nicephore Niepce used this nifty gadget to take the first photographic image with a camera obscura.

4. Speaking of pinhole cameras, you can make one yourself from pretty much anything lightproof and take actual (although pretty low resolution) photos. You can use most any material that can be bended, folded, molded or shaped into a lightproof box, a piece of film or photosensitive paper, and possibly some duct tape. My personal favorite: Pumpkin pinhole camera. Next time you’re making a jackolantern, carve this piece of vegetable into a simple, yet awesome camera and learn all about the basics of drawing with light (I”ve grown quite fond of this phrase).

5. Quite a lot of the same technology was used in manufacturing cameras and guns. In the early, some dry plate cameras were modeled on Colt revolver mechanisms, and cinema cameras were modeled on machine guns, whereas guncotton was used to make paper negative. Later,  gelatinized guncotton was invented that could be cut into strips, and later still amyl acetate was added to the mix, as well as nitroglycerine and acetone- at one point, cameras and guns both contained the same sort of chemicals in their cartridges – one used for creation, other for destruction.

If all this is not awesome enough for you, wait until we get to the art part. But that’s not something I’m going to write about myself- in the next few weeks, we’ll let some of the amazing artists and photographers who present their work on .Me talk about their art and their passion for photography.

We can’t wait for you to meet them and see their work!