Story filed: 11:52 Thursday 17th January 2002 

The grainy image of a boy leading a horse was taken by French photographic pioneer Joseph Niepce in 1825.

The 6in by 4in photo is due to be auctioned by Sotheby's in Paris.

Philippe Garner of Sotheby's said: "This image and its accompanying correspondence oblige us to rewrite those crucial first stages of the history of photography."

It was previously thought he produced the first permanent photograph in 1826.

Niepce created his photo of an engraving using a technique called heliography, where light is used to project an image on to a photo-sensitive surface.

The photo lay undiscovered in a French collection until recently without its significance being realized.

Photograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce 1827

This was Regarded to be the first known photograph (1827) until the above mentioned.

	Harold Eugene Edgerton 1931 Develops and perfects the stroboscope for use in both ultra-high-speed and still (or stop-motion) photography. This discovery is announced in the May issue of Electrical Engineering.  Forms partnership with former student Kenneth J. Germeshausen, an MIT research affiliate, to develop the stroboscope for various applications.  Receives D. Sc. in electrical engineering from MIT. See Biography Timeline

 

George Eastman (second from left) at a gathering associated with the Edison Scholarship in 1929. The man on the left is identified as Lewis Perry. The others (from left) are Charles Lindbergh, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and MIT president Samuel Stratton.  See More

 

Known worldwide for his work in photographic science and as an authority on complex color photography processing, Dr. C.E. Kenneth Mees devoted his life to the establishment of the science of photography. From the laboratories under Mees' direction came outstanding research achievements including home movies, panchromatic films and new processes of color photography.

At University College, London, Mees and Samuel Sheppard worked together on the theory of the photographic process.  Their theses, published as a book, Investigations on the Theory of the Photographic Process, was known to photographic workers as "Sheppard & Mees."

From 1906 through 1912, Mees worked for Wratten & Wainwright, Ltd.  While there, he manufactured a successful series of panchromatic plates, light filters and darkroom safelights. In 1912 he went to work for Eastman Kodak Company where he organized and directed the research laboratory.  He later became Director of Research and Development for Kodak.

He also helped to found several other departments including the first school of aerial photography; a synthetic organic chemistry department; and a photographic apparatus department.

He was the author of over 150 publications and received many photographic and scientific honors.  Included among those are the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain; the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences; and the Franklin Medal. Mees was a Fellow in the Royal Photographic Society; and Honorary Fellow in the Photographic Society of America; and an Honorary Master of Photography from the Photographers' Association of America.

See: http://www.iphf.org/inductees/cmees.html

 

Kodak to cease black and white paper-making

AP , Rochester, New York
Friday, Jun 17, 2005,Page 12

Ending a century-old tradition, Eastman Kodak Co will soon stop making black-and-white photographic paper, a niche product for fine-art photographers and hobbyists that is rapidly being supplanted by digital-imaging systems.

Kodak said Wednesday it will discontinue production of the paper, specially designed for black-and-white film, at the end of this year. But the world's biggest film manufacturer will continue to make black-and-white film and chemicals for processing.

"It's a shame to see it go," said Bill Schiffner, editor of Imaging Business magazine in Melville, New York. "Digital has done a lot of good things for the industry but it's done some bad things too. It's making a lot of these processes obsolete."

The paper is manufactured at a plant in Brazil. Kodak declined to specify how many employees would be affected by the production shutdown, which is part of a three-year overhaul to eliminate 12,000 to 15,000 jobs by 2007 and shrink the company's work force to around 50,000.

As the industry shifts rapidly from chemical-based to digital imaging, demand for black-and-white paper is declining about 25 percent annually, Kodak spokesman David Lanzillo said.

John Eoff, owner of Photo-Lab Inc, said his 91-year-old shop in Schenectady, New York, still sells "a fair amount" of black-and-white paper to photography students and enthusiasts, while professional photographers have mostly gone to digital printing systems already.

"What we assumed was going to happen is the traditional black-and-white paper processing was going to remain more an art form than a commodity," Eoff said. Other companies, led by Ilford Imaging of Britain, still make paper and there will be demand for it, he predicted.

In April, Kodak posted a first-quarter loss of US$142 million, citing a steady slide in revenues from film and other chemical-based businesses and higher-than-expected costs to cover job cuts. This month, it replaced its chief executive, Dan Carp, with Antonio Perez, who a few years ago oversaw the rapid growth of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s digital imaging business.

Kodak grew into an icon on the strength of its traditional film, paper and photofinishing businesses. It is now betting its future in digital terrain -- from cameras, inkjet paper and online photofinishing to photo kiosks and minilabs, X-ray systems and commercial printers.

Ilford, the largest maker of black-and-white photo paper, went into bankruptcy last year, emerging this year after a management-led buyout. Germany's AgfaPhoto GmbH filed for bankruptcy last month.

Kodak's exit from the business "doesn't surprise me" because many portrait and wedding photographers "are switching over to digital," said Christopher Chute, an analyst with market research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.

 

Camera
Joseph Nicephore Niepce

Niepce’s camera 'Obscura' consisted of two wooden boxes, one carrying a lens and the other a ground-glass screen. The boxes were connected by bellows so that the distance between the lend and screen could be varied. Also he invented an iris diaphragm which could be adjusted to vary the size of the aperture and thus sharpen the image. Also by using a sheet of paper which had been sensitized with silver chloride as the negative.

The invention of the camera has developed dramatically over the years. Such development are making the camera portable (developed first by Friedrich Risner, German mathematician), improvement in the films, electronic flash (invented in 1931 by Harold E Edgeron, American photographer), colour photograph(taken in 1861 by English photographer Tomas Sutton, also invented the single-lens reflex camera) and many more.  

Now days, the camera has been improved so much that is portable, colour, zoom and many more capability and also it had differ greatly in sizes as well.

Without the development of the camera, we would not be able to take photographs of the past and photographs for us to remember from. Without it we could not be able to accurately record what has happened in the past. Also the development of the still picture camera led to the development of many other things such as motion pictures.

http://library.thinkquest.org/16541/eng/learn/library/content/camera.htm

Hendersonville Camera Club, Hendersonville, NC  meets at the Sammy Williams Center, corner of 3rd. Avenue & Justice Street, Hendersonville, NC  at 6:30 PM on the 4th. Tuesday of each month. 

Come on by and pay us a visit! See some of our work. Have a cup of coffee and pick up a photo tip or two. And visit our website at:

www.cameraclubofhendersonville.com

The University of Rochester's C.E.K. Mees Observatory - devoted to research, teaching, and public instruction.

The Observatory is named after C. E. Kenneth Mees (1882-1960), longtime director of research at Eastman Kodak, in honor of his pioneering work in the development of sensitive photographic emulsions for use in astronomy.

The Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Imaging Science is an active partner in the Observatory. RIT has provided the facility's camera/imaging spectrograph, at the heart of which is a state-of-the-art 512x512 CCD and a voltage-tunable narrowband LCD filter. RIT is also investigating active-optical approaches to image improvement at the Observatory.

The Observatory is named after C. E. Kenneth Mees (1882-1960), longtime director of research at Eastman Kodak, in honor of his pioneering work in the development of sensitive photographic emulsions for use in astronomy. Its site on Gannett Hill includes the birthplace, and later the summer estate, of Frank E. Gannett (1876-1957), founder of the Gannett Newspapers. After Mr. Gannett's passing the estate was donated to the University of Rochester by his wife Caroline, for use as an observatory site. The Gannett family summer house now provides office space and sleeping quarters for the observers. The summit area adjacent to the estate, on which the telescope building sits, was ceded to UR by Ontario County.

The Observatory, the Gannett House, and the beautiful grounds surrounding them, are maintained by site superintendent Kurt Holmes, as they were by Kurt's father, Gene Holmes.

Research

Though most of the astrophysical research conducted by the faculty and graduate students of UR and RIT involves large telescopes on high mountain sites or in space, the Mees Observatory is still used for astronomical research at visible wavelengths. Recent projects have included investigation of the Initial Mass Function of young stellar clusters (using photometry and imaging spectroscopy) and looking for planets transiting nearby stars.

http://spider.pas.rochester.edu/mainFrame/resources/Mees.html

A History of The Rochester, NY Camera and Lens Companies

Local labs increasing focus on digital photography

"Our roll count has drastically gone down," said Kelley Hatfield, manager of Burch's One Hour Photo Digital in the Blue Cow building on U.S. 93. "It's just amazing."

"As far as a camera store goes, they're phasing out an awful lot of what we do," agreed Joel Brann, part owner of Photo Video Plus in Kalispell.

Instead of rolls of film, people can bring in memory cards to have photos printed. To accommodate these photographers, photo labs must have the right equipment to meet the growing digital demand.

"The labs that are staying in business really have had to adjust," Brann said. "If they haven't adjusted by now, they're probably going to go out of business."

Brann and others in the industry have adjusted by following the rapidly changing trends in photography. This has included watching the demand for slide film decrease dramatically.

"I would guess slides are down 80 percent probably," Brann said.

Sometimes the quickly shifting industry affects stores' big purchases. About seven years ago, Brann and his partner Paul Menssen bought machines to develop prints and write negatives to a CD. Then, it was brand-new technology.

"All the equipment is basically out of date now," Brann said.

Vendors also have to offer more digital cameras. Photo Video Plus sells about 30 digital cameras for every film camera, Brann said.

In December, they sold only four or five film cameras the whole month, Brann said, bringing the ratio closer to 40 to 1.

Most people have switched to digital for the sake of convenience, Brann said. Instead of developing an entire roll of film, photographers can choose which pictures, if any, they want to print.

"People are perceiving that digital is the way to go," he said.

The problem for photo labs is that at-home printing technology is increasing as rapidly as the cameras.

"We thought it was kind of scary at first because you see advertisements for printing your pictures at home," Hatfield said. "But people found out quickly that it's way more expensive to print them at home than to go to a photo lab."

This is because ink cartridges and special photo paper are so expensive, she said.

"It's so easy to just come here," she said.

Brann believes the benefit in bringing photos to a lab is in the quality.

"We can make a better print than you can at home," he said.

Hatfield agrees that quality is much better when customers bring their memory cards to a lab. Labs use the same printer for digital prints that they use when printing rolls of film, so the quality is identical.

"Customers are just amazed," she said. "They say, 'Wow, it's a real picture.'"

Those "real" pictures may still differ in quality from film photos, as people continue to debate whether film cameras take better pictures than digital.

Technique plays a large factor in this, Menssen said.

You can toss any image into a computer and fix it, he said, but an underexposed or overexposed digital shot will still look poor.

"The digital shot that was exposed well and then printed well looks very nice," he said.

"I think it's easier to take better pictures with digital," said Burch's owner Bob Burch. "I guess my take is that with a good quality camera, I've seen some pretty magnificent images.

"I think (digital) is a good thing from a picture-taking standpoint."

Brann disagrees.

"Film is still better in my opinion," he said. "There will be people who debate that."

Regardless of how good the shots are, there are more of them, thanks to digital cameras.

"The neat thing about it, the good thing, is there are more photographs being taken now than there were with just film," Brann said.

More photographs doesn't necessarily mean more prints, however. Because people can choose which photos they want printed, they are more likely to pick only a few pictures or simply store those pictures on their computers.

This is a trend that will continue with the increased popularity of camera phones. Conversation is no longer the sole function of a mobile phone. Now they can be used to listen to music, surf the Internet and yes, take pictures.

"I assume that that'll be a pretty big player shortly," Menssen said.

Right now, camera phones aren't making much impact on business, he said, because the images they produce are of such a low resolution that they don't print well.

Hatfield agrees.

"I haven't seen a good picture yet," she said.

This will not long be the case, though. Phones with chips of five megapixels or greater -- enough to easily print a high-quality 8.5-by-11 inch photo on a home printer -- are available outside the United States.

"We are not necessarily taking away from the ordinary digital camera but making picture-taking an experience that more people will do," said Camilla Gragg, communications manager with Nokia. "More people have cell phones in their hands than they have digital cameras.

"It's kind of opening it up to a broader audience. You might not have your camera with you, but you are probably going to have your cell phone."

Camera phone users tend to take "random" or "spur of the moment" pictures, according to a study released by Fuji Photo Film U.S.A. Inc. in September 2005.

All those random moments add up, and nearly half of the 400 camera-phone photographers surveyed wished they'd printed those pictures. The study also said that people who did print them took almost twice the number of photos as camera phone owners who didn't print their pictures.

Even with digital's incessant increase, photo labs haven't quite lived out their usefulness.

"We expect film to be around for a while," Menssen said. "(But) at some point people won't be processing film anymore. I don't know if that's two or three years away or 10 years away, but it will happen.