The history of the camera can be traced back much further than the
introduction of photography. Photographic cameras evolved from the camera
obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic
technology, including daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film, and digital
cameras.
Photographic cameras were a development of the
camera obscura, a device dating back to the ancient Chinese and ancient Greeks,
which uses a pinhole or lens to project
an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a viewing surface.
Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied the
matter. Bacon's notes and drawings, published as Perspectiva in 1267, are
partly clouded with theological material describing how the Devil can insinuate
himself through the pinhole by magic, and it is not clear whether or not he
produced such a device. On 24 January 1544 mathematician and instrument maker
Reiners
Gemma Frisius of Leuven University used one to watch a solar eclipse,
publishing a diagram of his method in De Radio Astronimica et Geometrico in the
following year, In 1558 Giovanni Batista della Porta was the first to recommend
the method as an aid to drawing.
Before the invention of photographic processes
there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from
manually tracing them. The earliest cameras were room-sized, with space for one
or more people inside; these gradually evolved into more and more compact
models such as that by Niépce's time portable handheld cameras suitable for
photography were readily available. The first camera that was small and
portable enough to be practical for photography was built by Johann Zahn in
1685, though it would be almost 150 years before such an application was
possible.
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