Photography 101

I probably should name this Photography 100 or Photography 90 or even lower. It's really mostly about finding the beginnings of photography and taking it to extremes. I mean details of techniques, procedures, gear, inspiring stories, etc. This should be fairily interesting to anyone who is seriously and/or pationately looking into photography. I will address here my findings, my searches, questions, worries, (well,... maybe not the worries :) about my involvement with photography. Since I will be starting more or less form scratch, this site should be addressing a whole bunch of topics as they pertain to what I stumble upon on my photographic adventures. Comments, suggestions from amateurs, professionals, or drive-by people are welcomed.

First, you need a camera. Unless you want to do it the old way. That is the really old way, say like in 1827, when the first actual photograph was made by French experimenter Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. I bet you didn't know that the exposure was 8 hours so the sun could actually be seen in both sides of the picture. (That is if you can make out of what exactly Mr. Niépce was photographing. - I am just being mean; you actually can).
Or, the very very old way just like Mr. Da Vinci in 1490 when he noted the priciples of the camera obscura which in Italian means "dark room". So how does that work?

Exclude as much daylight as possible from a room but allow a single beam to enter through a
small aperture the thickness of a pencil. Hold a sheet of white paper some 6in (~15cm) from the apertre and the scene outside the room will appear on the paper. It will be inverted (we have seen that before, haven't we? We see it all the time. That is really all the time. I bet you didn't know that the image is formed inverted on your retina (part of your eyes where the image is formed after it goes through your eyes - my Mom is an amazing ophtalmologist) but still somewhat recognizable. People have tried this over the centuries and even tried to come up with some portable camera obscura to "capture" some more images as they would travel different places. Imagine that(!) for a "camera". The way they would store these images would be to draw on a glass the image they would see coming through the aperture. It was used for portraits (more profiles actually I believe) and the process did involve drawing. Pretty slow, but back then, people really did take time to do things and if you think about it, up until about 200 years ago, people travaled just as fast (or just as slow) as in 33 AD.

So we find out that the actual camera is a room indeed. A room where we control the manner in which the light comes through (lenses, aperture, shutter speed) as well as the manner in which we capture that light in an image (on film or digital media).

I will stop right here for now and will be back. That's a little bit of introduction right here about what's "behind" the camera. I will address my impressions about the camera in a later post.