35 Powerful Photos That Tell A Story

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” That is the motto of a photojournalist. It is their objective to produce direct, truthful and bold images that tell the stories for those who have no voice.
According to Mark M. Hancock, a professional photojournalist, “is a visual reporter of facts. The public places trust in its reporters to tell the truth. The same trust is extended to photojournalists as visual reporters.This responsibility is paramount to a photojournalist. At all times, we have many thousands of people seeing through our eyes and expecting to see the truth. Most people immediately understand an image.”
Photojournalists are doing really a great job over the world for humanity, they are working for peace, for human rights, for raising humanity problems and issues, for pointing out the people living below the bottom line of poverty, for raising awareness about educational and child labor issues and much more… Our today’s post is about Inspirational Documentary and Photojournalism Photos. In this post we showcase 35 powerful, touching and emotional photos that do not just display state of affairs, but also tell a story.
We express sincere appreciation of the hard work of all photojournalists who are working for humanity, sometimes risking their life for the sake of their duties and responsibilities. This article is a tribute to all of them and their accomplishments and works.

Photojournalism & Documentary Photos

Man mutilated Rwanda
World Press Photo of the Year: 1994 James Nachtwey, USA, Magnum Photos for Time. Rwanda, June 1994. Hutu man mutilated by the Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels. About the image Nachtwey says his specialty is dealing with ground level realities with a human dimension. He feels that people need photography to help them understand what’s going on in the world, and believes that pictures can have a great influence on shaping public opinion and mobilizing protest.

Losing
In this picture, Lurlena cries in the back of the family car after losing the contest for Carnival Princess at her school. She spent the day getting ready, with a new white dress and new shoes. The winner was decided based on whose parents bought the most tickets, and Lurlena’s family could only afford eight dollars worth.

Hard Work in Hong Kong

tbaur

Sally Mann
This photo, titled Candy Cigarette, not just displays something, it tells a story. It is both emotional and beautiful. This is what the originality of black-and-white-photography is all about.

Pilgrim
Tibetans believe, once in their life, a pilgrimage to Lhasa is of exalted purpose and moral significance. Therefore, we see people like this, especially in spring and autumn, on their journey of faith, sometimes thousands of miles long, kowtowing every few steps.

Arirang Mass Games
Even during the Arirang Mass Games in North Korea, the ultimate expression of the state ideology, an individual can still sometimes stand out from the crowd and break free of the collective. If only just for a moment. (Photo and caption by Brendyn Zachary)

Iguazu falls in Brazil
“On my second day visiting the astounding Iguazu falls on the Brazilian side I was forced to change to my telephoto lens as my wide angle had been damaged by the water vapour. In had rained solid for 10 days prior to my arrival and so the falls were at their most spectacular. Standing on the elevated viewing platform I was able to shoot this school group who stood transfixed, emphasizing the incredible size of the falls. (Photo and caption by Ian Kelsall)”

Malawian boy running after 4×4
“I took the photo while on my one-month stint in Malawi Africa where I mainly worked in orphan day-care centres, also visiting Mulanji Hospital. The photo was taken from the Mulanji Hospital four-wheel-drive ambulance, travelling on the extremely rough roads from village to village, visiting the sick who were unable to reach the hospital.” Photo taken by Cameron Herweynen.

Sewing Machine
A damaged sewing machine after the cyclone hit, Amtali, Patuakhali, Bangladesh 19 November 2007. EPA/ABIR ABDULLAH

Shelter
Child takes shelter with his mother before the cyclone hit. Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

New Year’s Eve, St. Jacques, Perpignan, 2006
This picture of a five year-old gypsy boy was taken on New Year’s Eve 2006 in the gypsy community of St. Jacques, Perpignan, Southern France. For Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the men would gather in the Café in their best suits to drink and dance while their wives would prepare dinner at home. It is quite common in St. Jacques for little boys to smoke.

Riot in the city
Riot in Toulouse, France (March 25th, 2007) after the campaign of a politician.

Jump!

Pain and Beauty

Bhopal Disaster
This photograph from December 4, 1984 shows victims who lost their sight in the Bhopal poison gas tragedy as they sit outside the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India.

From the series “Children of Black Dust”, Dhaka, Bangladesh
A woman holds her child, blackened by carbon dust. His nose bleeds due to infections caused by exposure to dust and pollution during play in the workshop in Korar Ghat by on the outskirts of Dhaka. Many women bring their children along so they can look after them while working.

New York City
USA. New York City. September 15, 2001. Signing a memorial in Union Square.

Hhaing The Yu
Hhaing The Yu, 29, holds his face in his hand as rain falls on the decimated remains of his home in the Swhe Pyi Tha township, near Myanmar’s capital of Yangon (Rangoon), on Sunday, May 11th, 2008. Cyclone Nargis struck southern Myanmar a week ago leaving millions homeless and has claimed up to 100,000 lives.

Culture

Sandra Gil
A long line of visitors forms in front of Sandra Gil outside the Krome Detention Center in Miami where her husband, Oscar Gonzalez, is being held. On the morning of November 8, Immigration and Customs Enforecment (ICE) officers arrested the family at their home. They detained Gonzalez and released Gil with her son, American born Joshua Gonzalez, 5, with orders to leave for Colombia within weeks, The family was denied asylum after seven years living and working legally in teh country.

Memories
Sitting alone on a little place surrounded by cars traffic. Self-isolation. Waiting for nothing. He talked to me for about an hour. Of a lost life. An ordinary life like mine, like many others. And now…

Tap-Tap
Tap-tap buses waiting to get full and depart for their regular route in the downtown of Port-au-Prince.

Swiss pilot Yves Rossy
Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, the world’s first man to fly with a jet-powered fixed-wing apparatus strapped to his back, flies during his first official demonstration, on May 14, 2008 above Bex, Switzerland. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

María A.C. (ernieland)

Unknown

Gold Price
In Wall street, a man holds a placard of ” We Buy Gold”, as gold price has increased due to the current financial crisis or economic melt-down.
New York, Oct 13 2008.

Child Labor In Egypt

Construction worker, Soweto Township
Final construction at the Maponya mall in Piville township, Soweto. The 650 million Rand mall is one of the largest shopping centers in South Africa, and its opening is a sign of the commercial awakening of Soweto.

Child Labor. Bangladesh
Child labor is not a new issue in Bangladesh as children here remain one of the most vulnerable groups living under threats of hunger, illiteracy, displacement, exploitation, trafficking, physical and mental abuse. Although the issue of child labor has always been discussed, there is hardly any remarkable progress even in terms of mitigation. 17.5 percent of children aged 5-15 are engaged in economic activities. Many of these children are engaged in various hazardous occupations in factories.

Aftermath of Earthquake in Balakot, Pakistan. 2005
This image was taken about one month after the earthquake in Pakistan. People were still coming down from the mountains trying to find shelter and were suffering from trauma. Winter was on the way and the need for shelter was urgent. This father with his child had been collecting food. I spent ten days in Balakot documenting the situation after the quake. People were still digging for their family members.

Seen in Ludwigsburg, Germany

Huge Wave
Kerby Brown rides a huge wave in an undisclosed location southwest of Western Australia July 6, 2008, in this picture released November 7, 2008 by the Oakley-Surfing Life Big Wave Awards in Sydney. Picture taken July 6. (REUTERS/Andrew Buckley)

The Head of a Male Student
The head of a male student, still alive, trapped under the debris is pictured at the scene of the church school that collapsed on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, November 7, 2008. At least 30 people were killed when the three-story La Promesse school building collapsed while class was in session and some of the walls and debris crushed neighboring homes in the Nerettes community near Port-au-Prince. (REUTERS/Joseph Guyler Delva)

Starving Boy and Missionary
Wells felt indignant that the same publication that sat on his picture for five months without publishing it, while people were dying, entered it into a competition. He was embarrassed to win as he never entered the competition himself, and was against winning prizes with pictures of people starving to death. (World Press Photo of the Year: 1980 Mike Wells, United Kingdom. Karamoja district, Uganda, April 1980).

Afghan Girl
And of course the afghan girl, picture shot by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school within the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image. She was approximately 12 years old at the time. She made it on the cover of National Geographic next year, and her identity was discovered in 1992.

Sichuan Earthquake
A man is crying while he flips through a family album he found in the rubbles of his old house.

Post From Noupe

Telling Stories With Photos

A picture is worth a thousand words – or so the saying goes.

Please note – at the end of this post there is an assignment that relates to it that we’ll be doing together this week in our Digital Photography Flickr Group. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
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There are many reasons that I love photography, not the least of which is that a photograph (or a series of them) has the ability to convey stories to those that view them.
Over the centuries people have gathered around campfires, in town squares, over meals and in other places to tell their stories and these gatherings have become central to the shaping of cultures and communities. In more recent times some people have lamented that the art of story telling has been lost amidst the rise of different technologies.
Perhaps there is some truth in this – but I also wonder if perhaps it’s just the way we tell stories that has changed. One such medium for story telling in the time we live is digital photography.
A photograph has the ability to convey emotion, mood, narrative, ideas and messages – all of which are important elements of story telling.
Of course the gift of story telling is something that doesn’t just happen – good story tellers are intentional about learning how to tell stories and practice their craft. Following are a few tips for photographic story tellers.

The Short Story

Stories come in all shapes and sizes. Some are long (novels or even trilogies of novels) but others are short. Thinking photographically, these short stories might be one, or maybe two, images.
Most newspaper photography fits into this category of story telling – one image that attempts to capture the essence of an accompanying written story. They don’t have the luxury of multiple frames to introduce, explore and conclude so almost always tell the story of a single event rather than a longer one.
Such shots need to have something in them that grabs the attention of a viewer. They also will usually have visual and/or narrative focal points that lead the viewer into the photo.
Short Stories photos are often shots that leave the viewer of the photograph wondering about what they are looking at – not because they don’t understand it but because they intrigue and leave people imagining what is going on behind the image and what other future images of the scene might look like. In a sense these single image stories are often just as powerful because of what they don’t include in the shot as to what they do include.
Introduce Relationship – When telling a story through a single image think about including more than one person in the shot – when you do this you introduce ‘relationship’ into a photo which will conjure up all types of thoughts in the viewers of your shots.
Having said that, sometimes carefully framing a second person OUT of your shot can add to the story you’re trying to tell. Leaving evidence in the shot of a second unseen person can add questions to your viewers minds (ie a shot of a person alone at a table with two cups of coffee in front of them – or a shot of someone talking animatedly to an unseen person). Unseen elements of a photo can add a lot.
Also think about context – what’s going on around your subject? What’s in the background? What does the other elements of the photo say about your subject and what’s going on in their lives? Of course you don’t want to be too obvious about setting your background up – doing so could lead to cliched shots.

Multiple Image Stories

One of the mistakes that I find many new photographers making is that they find they need to put every possible element of a story or scene into each photograph that they take. This leads to photos that can be quite cluttered, that have too many focal points and that confuse the viewer of them.
One way to avoid this and yet to still tell a story with your images is to take a series of them. In a sense what you’re doing here is a step towards shooting a movie with your shots (a movie is a sequence of many thousands of images run together to tell a story).
Series of shots used to tell a story can be anything from two or three shots arranged in a frame or collage through to hundreds of shots arranged in an album (online or printed).
A common multiple image story that many of us will be familiar with will be the photography we do on a vacation. Whether we consider it or not – such a series of shots documents the experiences that we have over a period of days/weeks or even months. I’ve included a few photos (right) from one of my recent trips that tells the story of a night a group of us had smoking apple tobacco at a Turkish cafe.
Other multiple shot stories might include weddings, parties, conferences etc.

Structure

I’ve not studied the art of story telling in great depth but even from my high school studies of creative writing know that good stories don’t just happen. They take planning and some type of structure.
Before you start photographing your story consider what type of shots you might need to tell it. Basic stories will usually include the elements of introduction, plot/body and conclusion:
1. Introduction – shots that put the rest of the images into context. These shots introduce important characters that will follow, give information about the place where the story is happening, set the tone that the story will be told in and introduce the themes that the story will meander through (see below for more on themes).
Introductory shots need to lead viewers into the body of the story. If you think about a good novel, it’s often the first few paragraphs that determine whether people will buy and read the book in full or not – the same is true with visual stories. Introductory shots should give people a reason to go deeper into the story.
So in a travel album – these shots might show the travelers packing, could include a macro shot of a map of the destination or of the tickets etc.
2. Plot – good stories are more than just empty words. They explore ideas, feelings, experiences etc on a deeper level. Plot shots will probably make up the majority of your photographic story. They show what happens but also explore themes and ideas.
So in a travel album I try to identify themes in my shots that I will revisit throughout a trip. Types of themes might include:

• Visual themes – perhaps colors or shapes that come up again and again on a trip – for example a friend recently showed me his album from a recent trip to the Greek Islands that featured quite a few shots with white buildings and blue seas – very powerful.
• Stylistic themes – repetition of photographic techniques and styles. For example on my last overseas trip I decided to include a series of macro shots of the different flora that I saw and ended up with a series of shots of flowers from a variety of different parts of the world.
• Locational themes – reoccurring photos from similar types of places. For example on a trip a few years back I decided to make ‘markets’ a theme in my shots across the trip. I sought out and photographed markets in every city and town we visited. I found it fascinating to see the similarities and differences between them.
• Relational themes – shots that focus upon a person or people over time. On a travel story this might document the moods of a person as they go through the highs and lows of travel or could document the development of a relationship between friends, lovers, siblings etc over time.

A photographic story might just focus upon one theme or could intertwine a number of them. Not every shot in a travel album will probably fit in with themes but I find that when you work to build them into what you do that there is a real payoff.
Sometimes themes will emerge while you’re on the go (on a trip for example things will hit you while on the road that you’d never have expected to explore) but many of them are things that you need to consider and plan for. For example my ‘market’ and ‘flora’ themes were things I had to build into my trip. I sought these shots out and put myself in places where I’d get the shots I was after.
Some photographers write themselves a ‘hit list’ of shots that they want to get in a given day (this is what I do with weddings) while others do it more informally in their mind – but most good photographers have the ability to not only take good spontaneous shots but also are quite intentional about getting the types of shots that they need.
3. Conclusion – good story tellers are quite intentional about the way they end their stories. Last impressions count and it’s worth considering what lasting image/s you want to leave with the viewer of your photos.
By no means do you need to tie up your story neatly (good stories sometimes leave people feeling unsettled and wanting resolution) but do consider how you want to end.
To continue our travel story example, concluding shots could be anything from the cliched sunset shot (I think it’s been overdone personally) through to airport shots, unpacking shots, plane shots, some shots from the last meal at the destination, signs to the airport etc etc etc.

Editing

I have a number of friends who are in the publishing business and they tell me that novels rarely go to press in their original form. They generally take a lot of reworking and editing to get them into a form that will work.
The same is usually true with photographic story telling.
Editing happens on a number of levels and ranges from the editing of single photos (cropping, sharpening, enhancing of colors etc) through to the editing and presentation of the overall series of shots.
When presenting your images as a series it is important to be selective with the shots you include (and leave out). With travel albums I generally put together two for each trip. The first one is the story album and is the one I show to most people. The second one is where I keep all of my photos – generally in the order that they were taken.
In this way I don’t overwhelm people with the hundreds of photos I take on a trip but select the best ones and arrange them in a way that best tells the story of the trip. Sometimes in the editing process the chronological order becomes less important as the story and the themes within it are more dominant.

Photographic Assignment

This week’s Digital Photography School Assignment is to photograph and present a photographic story. I’ve set up a discussion thread in our DPS flickr group for you to do this.
Your story can be a one image story or a longer one (lets try to keep it to five images in total). It can be on any topic you’d like, perhaps you’ll tell the story of a party, your day, an interaction with a friend, a day trip/holiday, a sporting event, your pet at play etc.
To show us simply post your photo/s in the comments of the assignement thread. If you’d like you can also tell us a little about the story – or just let the pictures speak for themselves.
Alternatively – make a Flickr set of your own and link to it in the comments section so we know where to go view it.
Update: I just stumbled across this example of a photographic story that I think illustrates a lot of what I’ve written above. It’s a series of photos, accompanied by audio that tells the story of a homeless man’s day to day life. Please be aware there is some strong language in it, but it’s quite a powerful use of image to tell one man’s story.

 Post from Digital Photography School

History - What is Photography?

PHOTOGRAPHY. 

The word photography comes from two ancient Greek words: photo, for "light," and graph, for "drawing." "Drawing with light" is a way of describing photography. When a photograph is made, light or some other form of radiant energy, such as X rays, is used to record a picture of an object or scene on a light-sensitive surface. Early photographs were called sun pictures, because sunlight itself was used to create the image.    Mankind has been a maker of images at least since the cave paintings of some 20,000 years ago. With the invention of photography, a realistic image that would have taken a skilled artist hours or even days to draw could be recorded in exact detail within a fraction of a second.
Today, photography has become a powerful means of communication and a mode of visual expression that touches human life in many ways. For example, photography has become popular as a means of crystallizing memories.    Most of the billions of photographs taken today are snapshots--casual records to document personal events such as vacations, birthdays, and weddings.
Photographs are used extensively by newspapers, magazines, books, and television to convey information and advertise products and services.    Practical applications of photography are found in nearly every human endeavor from astronomy to medical diagnosis to industrial quality control. Photography extends human vision into the realm of objects that are invisible because they are too small or too distant, or events that occur too rapidly for the naked eye to detect. A camera can be used in locations too dangerous for humans. Photographs can also be objects of art that explore the human condition and provide aesthetic pleasure. For millions of people, photography is a satisfying hobby or a rewarding career.

 Photography as Art   

 Today photography is widely recognized as a fine art. Photographs are displayed in art museums, prized by collectors, discussed by critics, and studied in art history courses. Because of the special nature of photography, however, this was not always the case. In the early days of photography some people considered the medium something of a poor relation to the older, established visual arts, such as drawing and painting.    The arguments stemmed from the fact that a camera is a mechanical instrument. Because the mechanical procedure of taking a picture is automatic, detractors claimed that photography required no coordination of hand and eye and none of the manual skills essential to drawing and painting. They also argued that photography required no creativity or imagination because the photographic subject was "ready-made" and did not require manipulation or control by the photographer.
 A camera, no matter how many automatic features it may have, is a lifeless piece of equipment until a person uses it. It then becomes a uniquely responsive tool--an extension of the photographer's eye and mind. A photographer creates a picture by a process of selection. Photographers looking through the camera's viewfinder must decide what to include and what to exclude from the scene. They select the distance from which to take the picture and the precise angle that best suits their purpose. They select the instant in which to trip the shutter. This decision may require hours of patient waiting until the light is exactly right or it may be a split-second decision, but the photographer's sense of timing is always crucial.    Photographers can expand or flatten perspective by the use of certain lenses. They can freeze motion or record it as a blur, depending on their choice of shutter speed. They can create an infinite number of lighting effects with flashes or floodlights. They can alter the tonal values or colors in a picture by their choice of film and filters. These are only a few of the controls available to a photographer when taking a picture. Later, in the darkroom, many additional choices are available.   
One of the best ways to view artistic photographs is to visit museums. Today most art museums include photography exhibitions, and many have a photography department and a permanent collection of photographic prints. This is a relatively recent development.  Another great way to view photographs is to look at a quality magaznie like National Geograpics.

Control of Light

Camera Obscura    The camera obscura had been known since ancient times. It was first detailed in writing by artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci.  Meaning literally "darkened room," it was originally a room completely sealed from light except for a very small hole in one wall. An image of the outside world--houses, trees, and even people--could be projected, upside down and reversed right-to-left, onto a wall or white screen placed opposite the opening.    Later the camera obscura was reduced in size until it became a small portable box. It was equipped with a lens and a mirror at a 45-degree angle, which reflected the image upward and focused it on a viewing screen. This was a great aid to artists in making sketches on location, but there was not yet a way to capture directly and permanently the camera obscura's images. 

Making  the Image Permanent    

  Scientists had known for some time that certain silver compounds, then called silver salts and now named silver halides, would turn black when exposed to light. In England, Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter, experimented with one of these silver halides, silver nitrate, to produce silhouettes. The pictures, however, were not permanent and turned black unless stored in the dark.
1.Niepce      In the early 19th century Joseph-Nicephore Niepce of France began to experiment with a then novel graphic arts printing method called lithography. His work led him to further experiments using bitumen, a resinous substance, and oil of lavender. Niepce developed a process whereby he could permanently capture the image of a camera obscura. In 1827 he made the world's first surviving photograph from the window of a country home in France. It required an exposure, in bright sunlight, of eight hours.
2.Daguerre Meanwhile, Daguerre was experimenting with silver-iodide images. Hearing of Niepce's work, he contacted him, and in 1829 they became partners. During the next few years Daguerre, with Niepce's help, worked out the process that came to be known as daguerreotypy. It was a complicated procedure that demanded considerable skill. A silver-coated sheet of copper was sensitized by treatment with iodine vapor, forming a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide. The daguerreotype plate was exposed in the camera and then developed in mercury fumes at temperatures of about 120 degrees F (50 degrees C). The exposed areas absorbed mercury atoms and highlighted the image. Finally, the image was fixed by washing it in hypo.   The daguerreotype's silver image was capable of rendering exquisitely fine detail. It was a single-image process, however--each exposure produced only one picture, incapable of reproduction. Furthermore, the process required exposures of up to several minutes even in bright sunlight, thus constraining its subjects to absolute motionlessness.    In spite of this, the process immediately became popular, particularly for portraiture. Daguerreotypy rapidly developed into a thriving business in England and the United States. Superb portraits were made by such daguerreotypists as Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes in Boston. The French excelled in landscapes and cityscapes.   In 1840 a much faster lens was designed by the Hungarian Jozsef Petzval and manufactured by Peter Voigtlander in Austria. At about the same time a method was discovered that increased considerably the light sensitivity of the daguerreotype plate. This method involved a second fuming with chlorine or bromine before exposure.
3.TalbotIn England William Henry Fox Talbot had developed his own method of photography at about the same time that Daguerre was inventing the daguerreotype. Talbot impregnated paper with silver nitrate or silver chloride. When exposed in a camera, the sensitized paper turned black where light struck it, creating a negative image of the subject. This was made permanent by fixing with hypo.   To achieve a positive image, a contact print could be made by placing the negative over a second piece of sensitized paper and exposing the combination to bright light. Talbot's "photogenic drawings," as he called them, lacked the daguerreotype's sharp detail and brilliance but offered the great advantage that from one negative a large number of positive prints could be made. His process, known as the calotype, and later talbotype, process, was at first less popular than the daguerreotype. Most later methods of photography, however, have evolved from Talbot's work. His was the first negative-positive process.
4.ArcherIn 1851 F. Scott Archer of England made public his wet-collodion process, in which he used a glass plate coated with collodion as a base for light-sensitive silver halides. His procedure, requiring seven steps, was only slightly less complicated than the daguerreotype process, but it was considerably less expensive. It also produced a negative that was much sharper than that of the calotype method. Soon the wet-collodion process had supplanted both the older techniques as the most widely used process of photography. A major inconvenience of the wet-collodion method was the fact that the plate was light-sensitive only as long as it remained wet; after it dried it lost its sensitivity. Thus plates had to be used almost immediately after preparation. Since these plates could not be prepared and stockpiled in advance, a portable darkroom, in the form of a tent, wagon, or railway car, for instance, had to accompany the camera wherever it went.

 C. Reportage & Early Pioneers       

Despite this drawback, intrepid photographers made photographs in remote locations and under the most dangerous conditions, creating images that are still considered masterpieces of the medium. Roger Fenton of England became a pioneer in war photography with his camp scenes from the Crimean War. Mathew Brady and his team of associates, including Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and James Gibson, achieved a magnificent documentation of the American Civil War . After the war, Gardner, O'Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson photographed the opening of the American West and provided a lasting record of its awesome scenery.  
In the mid-1850s the tintype, an inexpensive imitation of the daguerreotype, was patented by the American Hamilton L. Smith. It was, in fact, not made of tin, but of a very thin sheet of iron specially treated and coated with a light-sensitive emulsion. The tintype became very popular for personal portraits.    
Stereoscopic photography also became extremely popular during this period. A special stereo camera with two lenses was used to take two simultaneous photographs of the subject from viewpoints separated by about the same distance as a pair of human eyes. When the resulting pictures were viewed through a special viewing device, they merged to create a three-dimensional image. Stereoscopic images of travel pictures, landscapes, important events, and comic pictorial short stories were sold by the millions.  
In 1871 a new era in photography began when an amateur English photographer, R.L. Maddox, produced a successful dry plate that retained its light-sensitivity after drying. Other inventors followed his lead, and soon fast, reliable dry plates, much more convenient to use than the earlier wet plates, became available at a reasonable cost.  
The dry plate represented a turning point in photography. With the availability of faster emulsions, photographers could make exposures on the order of a fraction of a second, and for the first time the camera was freed from a stand.   A new breed of smaller, more portable cameras proliferated, variously called hand cameras or detective cameras. With fast-dry plates, and later with film, photography could be practiced by amateurs without the need for professional training or equipment.   As shutter speeds became fast enough to stop motion, a fascinating new world of vision unfolded. Especially notable was the work of the Englishman Eadweard Muybridge, who pioneered work in the field of motion-picture projection.  He photographed sequences of human and animal motion that fascinated artists, anatomists, and the general public alike.

D. The Kodak Era    

In the 1880s the American George Eastman  put flexible roll film on the market, and in 1889 he introduced the first Kodak camera with the slogan, "You push the button and we do the rest." Thus was launched the era of mass-market photography.   Meanwhile, gifted photographers were exploring the new medium from a creative standpoint, attempting to discover its potential and limitations and define photography as an art form. At first it was only natural that photographers should take their inspiration from painting. Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, for example, working in England, used various darkroom techniques, tricks, and manipulations to produce staged photographs that frankly imitated the sentimental, moralistic paintings of the era.
  The English amateur Julia Margaret Cameron did not take up photography until she was almost 50. Nevertheless, she imposed her own personal style on the medium and produced a collection of extraordinary portraits that were soft focused but impassioned. Another English amateur, Peter Henry Emerson, developed a strong pictorial style of his own and advanced detailed theories of photographic aesthetics that had a considerable influence on late 19th-century art photographers.
The American Alfred Stieglitz, a distinguished photographer in his own right, began to promote photography as a fine art in the pages of his illustrated quarterly Camera Work, in his Photo-Secession group, and later in his 291 gallery.

E. A New Generation of Photographers    

  A new generation of photographers emerged who were determined to turn away from the pictorial style and its soft-focus, painterly effects to a more direct, unmanipulated, and sharply focused approach. This new form was called "straight" photography, and its practitioners believed it most truly expressed photography's unique vision. One pioneer was Paul Strand, whose photographs reveal a deep awareness of what he called "the spirit of place." The movement's most famous figures were Edward Weston and his younger associate Ansel Adams . 
Fenton, Roger (1819-69). English. Best known for his pictures of the Crimean War, which constituted the first extensive photographic coverage of a war. Fenton established his reputation through his high-quality still lifes and landscapes. In 1853 he founded the (Royal) Photographic Society of London. He was sent to the Crimea in 1855 as the British government's official photographer.  
Heartfield, John (1891-1968). German. Original name Helmut Herzfelde. Initially a Dadaist, Heartfield was one of the greatest masters of photomontage. Violent contrasts of scale and perspective, ruthless cropping of heads and bodies, the substitution of machine parts for vital organs, and other seeming illogical juxtapositions had a shocking effect. During the German Third Reich, Heartfield's anti-Fascist montages were among the strongest protests made.  
Hine, Lewis (1874-1940). American. A master of composition and mood, Hine used his camera in the cause of social reform. In 1908 he published a pictorial record of Ellis Island immigrants. In 1911 he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee, and he used his photographic documentation of child labor abuses to bring about corrective legislation. Hine recorded the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930. The photographs were published in 1932 in a book titled `Men at Work'.  
Jackson, William Henry (1843-1942). American. One of the best-known Western landscape and Indian portrait photographers in the 19th century. From 1870 to 1878 he was the official photographer for the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. His photographs of Wyoming were instrumental in the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.

 F. Technical Development

    Technical developments in photographic equipment continued. Shortly before World War I, Oskar Barnack in Germany, working as a technician for the E. Leitz company, invented a miniature camera that used perforated strips of 35-mm film. It was first introduced to the market in 1924 as the Leica. Many dismissed it as a mere toy ill-equipped for serious work, but others were delighted by its compact size and ability to make up to 36 exposures in rapid succession.
Continual improvement over the years established the 35-mm camera, especially in its single-lens reflex form, as the dominant camera for both professionals and serious amateurs.   In 1930 the highly dangerous flashpowder was largely supplanted by flashbulbs. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, experiments with gas discharge flash tubes led to the development of the electronic flash, which could produce astonishing images made at exposures as brief as 1/10,000 second. Although they originally required expensive and cumbersome equipment, electronic flash units became so miniaturized that they could be built into a pocket camera.  
Color had been the dream of photographers since the medium of photography was invented. The foundation for color photography had been established in 1859 by James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist who demonstrated that all colors could be reduced to combinations of three primary colors. Many attempts were made to apply this principle to photography, but it was not until many decades later that inventors were successful.   In 1907 two Frenchmen, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, placed on the market their autochrome glass plates. These plates were coated with starch grains that were dyed red, green, and blue, over which was a second coating of panchromatic emulsion. After 1930 the much sharper "integral tripack" color films were introduced, which used dyes rather than grains.
Kodachrome in particular became famed for its sharpness and rich colors. These new films were positive transparency films, but soon color negative films were introduced. Today color negative film constitutes the vast majority of film sold to amateur photographers in the United States.   Instant, or self-processing, photography was invented by the American Edwin H. Land. He introduced the Polaroid Land camera in 1947, and a color version became available in 1963.

 I. Photography in Communication 

    Since its invention in 1839, photography's unique powers of visual description have been used to record, report, and inform. People prefer to see things with their own eyes, but when this is impossible the camera can often serve the same purpose almost as well. It is not true that photographs never lie--they can be falsified and manipulated. Nevertheless, a photograph can carry a strong measure of authenticity and conviction.
As a nonverbal means of communication, photography can surmount the barriers of language and communicate through universal visual symbols.   Photographs are well suited for use in the mass media. Today they are reproduced by the billions, and they can be found everywhere: in the pages of newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs, and brochures; on display in billboards, shop windows, and posters; broadcast over television; and organized into slide shows and film strips.  
In photography's early days some of its most eagerly sought images were those brought back by explorers and travelers. These would satisfy people's curiosity about distant places like China, Egypt, and the American West. That same kind of curiosity exists today. People are fascinated with photographs of the surface of the moon, the landscape of Mars, and the appearance of other planets in the solar system.  
Photographs in the mass-communication media have made the faces of political leaders, popular entertainers, and other celebrities familiar to the public. When a newsworthy event occurs photojournalists are there to record it. Photojournalists sometimes spend months covering a story. The result of such labor is often a powerful, revealing picture essay that probes far beneath the surface of events.
Photography is also essential to the advertising industry. In efforts to sell a product, attractive photographs of the item are used. Photography is also widely used in education and training within the academic world, industry, and the armed services.  
Photographs are also often used in attempts to sway public opinion. Governments, political parties, and special-interest groups have long used the graphic representation and emotional impact of photographs to further their causes. Such use may result in destructive propaganda, such as that of the Nazis during the Third Reich.
Photography can also help to bring about desirable changes. Photographs of the Yellowstone region were instrumental in Congress's decision to establish that area as a national park, and photographs of child laborers helped to bring about legislation protecting children from exploitation.

Post from Scphoto.com

Photography

Photography (see section below for etymology) is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film, or electronically by means of an image sensor. Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. The result in an electronic image sensor is an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing.

The result in a photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically developed into a visible image, either negative or positive depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.

Photography has many uses for business, science, manufacturing (e.g. photolithography), art, recreational purposes, and mass communication.


Etymology

The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), "light" and γραφή (graphé) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light".

Several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Hercules Florence, a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, Brazil, used the French form of the word, photographie, in private notes which a Brazilian photography historian believes were written in 1834. Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, is credited in a 1932 German history of photography as having used it in an article published on February 25, 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung.[6] Both of these claims are now widely reported but apparently neither has ever been independently confirmed as beyond reasonable doubt. Credit has traditionally been given to Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. His uses of it in private correspondence prior to February 25, 1839 and at his Royal Society lecture on the subject in London on March 14, 1839 have long been amply documented and accepted as settled fact.


Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Di and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera, Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate, and Georg Fabricius (1516–71) discovered silver chloride. Techniques described in the Book of Optics are capable of producing primitive photographs using medieval materials.

Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as photography.

The discovery of the camera obscura that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural cameras obscura that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. So the birth of photography was primarily concerned with developing a means to fix and retain the image produced by the camera obscura.

The first success of reproducing images without a camera occurred when Thomas Wedgwood, from the famous family of potters, obtained copies of paintings on leather using silver salts. Since he had no way of permanently fixing those reproductions (stabilizing the image by washing out the non-exposed silver salts), they would turn completely black in the light and thus had to be kept in a dark room for viewing.

Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. The camera obscura literally means "dark chamber" in Latin. It is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper.
First camera photography (1820s)

Invented in the early decades of the 19th century, photography by means of the camera seemed able to capture more detail and information than traditional media, such as painting and sculpture. Photography as a usable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825. He made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e., of the image of a real-world scene, as formed in a camera obscura by a lens), in 1826 or 1827.

Because Niépce's camera photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days), he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. Working in partnership with Louis Daguerre, he developed a somewhat more sensitive process that produced visually superior results, but it still required a few hours of exposure in the camera. Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre then redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive silver halides, which Niépce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent. Daguerre's efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process, the essential elements of which were in place in 1837. The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of hours. Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the approximately ten-minute-long exposure to be visible. Eventually, France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his process in exchange for the right to present his invention to the world as the gift of France, which occurred on August 19, 1839.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, Hercules Florence had already created his own process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and an English inventor, William Fox Talbot, had created another method of making a reasonably light-fast silver process image but had kept his work secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention in January of 1839, Talbot published his method and set about improving on it. At first, like other pre-daguerreotype processes, Talbot's paper-based photography typically required hours-long exposures in the camera, but in 1840 he created the calotype process, with exposures comparable to the daguerreotype. In both its original and calotype forms, Talbot's process, unlike Daguerre's, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies, the basis of most chemical photography up to the present day. Daguerreotypes could only be replicated by rephotographing them with a camera.[21] Talbot's famous tiny paper negative of the Oriel window in Lacock Abbey, one of a number of camera photographs he made in the summer of 1835, may be the oldest camera negative in existence.[22][23]

John Herschel made many contributions to the new field. He invented the cyanotype process, later familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". He had discovered in 1819 that sodium thiosulphate was a solvent of silver halides, and in 1839 he informed Talbot (and, indirectly, Daguerre) that it could be used to "fix" silver-halide-based photographs and make them completely light-fast. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.

In the March 1851 issue of The Chemist, Frederick Scott Archer published his wet plate collodion process. It became the most widely used photographic medium until the gelatin dry plate, introduced in the 1870s, eventually replaced it. There are three subsets to the collodion process; the Ambrotype (a positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (a positive image on metal) and the glass negative, which was used to make positive prints on albumen or salted paper.

Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made during the rest of the 19th century. In 1884, George Eastman developed an early type of film to replace photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.

In 1891, Gabriel Lippmann introduced a process for making natural-color photographs based on the optical phenomenon of the interference of light waves. His scientifically elegant and important but ultimately impractical invention earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908.
 

Black-and-white

All photography was originally monochrome, or black-and-white. Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its "classic" photographic look. The tones and contrast between light and dark shadows define black and white photography.[24] It is important to note that some monochromatic pictures are not always pure blacks and whites, but also contain other hues depending on the process. The cyanotype process produces an image composed of blue tones. The albumen process, first used more than 150 years ago, produces brown tones.

Many photographers continue to produce some monochrome images, often because of the established archival permanence of well processed silver halide based materials. Some full color digital images are processed using a variety of techniques to create black and whites, and some manufacturers produce digital cameras that exclusively shoot monochrome.


Color photography

Color photography was explored beginning in the mid-19th century. Early experiments in color required extremely long exposures (hours or days for camera images) and could not "fix" the photograph to prevent the color from quickly fading when exposed to white light.

The first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. Maxwell's idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green and blue filters. This provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image.

Transparent prints of the images could be projected through similar color filters and superimposed on the projection screen, an additive method of color reproduction. A color print on paper could be produced by superimposing carbon prints of the three images made in their complementary colors, a subtractive method of color reproduction pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauron in the late 1860s.

Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made extensive use of this color separation technique, employing a special camera which successively exposed the three color-filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate. Because his exposures were not simultaneous, unsteady subjects exhibited color "fringes" or, if rapidly moving through the scene, appeared as brightly colored ghosts in the resulting projected or printed images.

The development of color photography was hindered by the limited sensitivity of early photographic materials, which were mostly sensitive to blue, only slightly sensitive to green, and virtually insensitive to red. The discovery of dye sensitization by photochemist Hermann Vogel in 1873 suddenly made it possible to add sensitivity to green, yellow and even red. Improved color sensitizers and ongoing improvements in the overall sensitivity of emulsions steadily reduced the once-prohibitive long exposure times required for color, bringing it ever closer to commercial viability.

Autochrome, the first commercially successful color process, was introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Autochrome plates incorporated a mosaic color filter layer made of dyed grains of potato starch, which allowed the three color components to be recorded as adjacent microscopic image fragments. After an Autochrome plate was reversal processed to produce a positive transparency, the starch grains served to illuminate each fragment with the correct color and the tiny colored points blended together in the eye, synthesizing the color of the subject by the additive method. Autochrome plates were one of several varieties of additive color screen plates and films marketed between the 1890s and the 1950s.

Kodachrome, the first modern "integral tripack" (or "monopack") color film, was introduced by Kodak in 1935. It captured the three color components in a multilayer emulsion. One layer was sensitized to record the red-dominated part of the spectrum, another layer recorded only the green part and a third recorded only the blue. Without special film processing, the result would simply be three superimposed black-and-white images, but complementary cyan, magenta, and yellow dye images were created in those layers by adding color couplers during a complex processing procedure.

Agfa's similarly structured Agfacolor Neu was introduced in 1936. Unlike Kodachrome, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neu were incorporated into the emulsion layers during manufacture, which greatly simplified the processing. Currently available color films still employ a multilayer emulsion and the same principles, most closely resembling Agfa's product.

Instant color film, used in a special camera which yielded a unique finished color print only a minute or two after the exposure, was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.

Color photography may form images as positive transparencies, which can be used in a slide projector, or as color negatives intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography owing to the introduction of automated photo printing equipment.
 

Digital photography

In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a charge-coupled device for imaging, eliminating the need for film: the Sony Mavica. While the Mavica saved images to disk, the images were displayed on television, and the camera was not fully digital. In 1991, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100, the first commercially available digital single lens reflex camera. Although its high cost precluded uses other than photojournalism and professional photography, commercial digital photography was born.

Digital imaging uses an electronic image sensor to record the image as a set of electronic data rather than as chemical changes on film. An important difference between digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography resists photo manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper, while digital imaging is a highly manipulative medium. This difference allows for a degree of image post-processing that is comparatively difficult in film-based photography and permits different communicative potentials and applications.