Cameras: Stories Though Frames.

Imagine taking 60 pictures (frames) in one second. Each frame, has its own unique way to absorb the viewer, grasping at details, and clawing at emotions. Each frame, tells a story that allows us to live that moment that had its birth in someone else's mind. The journey of a thought from a brain to the curtain of your stage. All of this is possible due to a simple, video camera, which can now be found in all of our phones. Something whose importance we rarely ever acknowledge, and yet it has changed life for every human that has ever used it, in a beautiful way. Let's have a look at how this invention, which is nothing short of miraculous, came to be. First Camera: In the 1500s, Hasan Ibn Al-Haytham, who is also known as the father of modern optics invented the first pinhole camera called the Camera Obscura. It contained a light-proof box with a small hole on one side for light to enter into it. This entering light would then strike a reflective surface to give an inverted, but colored image. This Camera Obscura was not at all invented with the purpose of being a camera, in fact, it was mostly used in solar events.

Fast forward to the 1830s, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable Camera Obscura to expose a Pewter Plate (silver-colored metal in the shape of a plate) coated with bitumen, which is basically the formation of photographs using sunlight and heavy petroleum, to light.

Niépce collaborated with Louis Daguerre, who was a French Artist, and the result of their collaboration was the Daguerreotype. A daguerreotype uses a copper plate coated with silver and is exposed to vapor. Steps for using a Daguerreotype: Step 1: Polishing A copper sheet is polished with Silver until it has amirror-likee finish. Step 2: Sensitization The polished product is then exposed to halogen fumes, preferably bromine fumes so that it would form Silver Bromide, which was found to increase sensitivity. Step 3: Exposure After sensitization, the product has to be exposed to light, with the intended person in the frame of the light. This process would take anywhere from a few seconds up to 15 minutes! It was very popular until it was replaced in the 1850s, with the invention of Emulsion Plates. Emulsion plates were different, and better, they required only a few seconds of exposure and it was of two types: Ambrotype; which used glass plates instead of copper plates for the daguerreotype. Tin type; as the name suggests, it used tin. But the problem with these was that they had to be developed quickly. Developed........ what does that mean? Developing is a chemical means by which photographic film paper is treated to produce a negative.....

or a positive.

This process turns the latent image, which is invisible into a visible image and renders it insensitive to light, making sure that there are no alterations due to sunlight after it has been developed. This is why Jonathan gets mad when Nancy opens the door, exposing light when he is developing images. In the 1870s, Richard Maddox invented revolutionary dry gelatin plates. These were much better and more useful than the emulsion plates. This allowed the photographer much more time to develop the images, and since they were smaller, they could be stored and allowed for smaller cameras. But all of these inventions and luxuries were still a dream for many people, because of the costs of these things. The expense of buying a camera was almost impossible for the normal public and this was a problem. In 1892, Kodak was founded by George Eastman, and cameras were made available to the public at a price that they could afford. This camera that was released by Kodak had a photo capacity of 100 pictures, but you had to send the camera to the factory only when you have had your fill and want all of your images developed, so the photographs you took, were not instant. This problem by Kodak was later solved by a fellow camera company which would bring about a wave of change in the camera industry. But we'll get to that.

Oscar Barnack, who was a German inventor researched into making smaller cameras and built the first successful 35 mm still camera in 1913. A competition named the 'Leica Oskar Barnack Award Worldwide' is a worldwide contest where people compete with their images and one image is declared the winner of that particular year.

Films used back then were still large and expensive, even though by the 1940s, the 35 mm film had become popular and cheap enough. Around 1948, for the first time, Polaroid introduced the model 95 which had the capacity to take and develop photographs in under one minute. This was nothing short of a miracle in those times and it still is. For the people back then, it was as modern as the world got and for us today, people still use it as a token of memories and as a vintage aesthetic. Polaroid solved all the problems created by the dry gelatin plates, and basically every camera that was invented before it.

Around the 1950s, Nikon Introduced the Nikon F camera which was of the SLR type. What is an SLR-type camera? SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex camera, which basically means that you can view through the lens what you are about to capture in your picture. That's where the word DSLR comes from. The only difference is that in the DSLR, the D stands for Digital, hence the images are stored digitally on a memory card, whereas the SLR camera stored the images on a film made of gelatin or plastic.

These SLR cameras remained the choice of the public for over the next 30 years! Until the 1990s, when Kodak DCS was the first commercially available DSLR. Soon, companies like Canon, Nikon, and Pentax followed.

From here on it was only progress for the cameras, new inventions were put in every model, every company, trying to make a better product, and camera feats were unbelievable. People were now watching movies in IMAX, which was an unbelievable upgrade for the public. But, what is the difference between normal screens and IMAX screens? Well, IMAX screens can provide images up to 10 times larger, giving more life to the film and the details. Digital IMAX uses two 2k Projectors having a resolution of 2.9K whereas IMAX 70 mm, which is the highest quality film ever computed gives you a whopping 18k video quality! The Wi-Fi in our homes struggles to load YouTube videos that are 1080 pixels, this is 18 times that quality, which means it is 18 times bigger, better image that will give you a viewer experience unprecedented before. Oppenheimer, which is set to be released July 21, is filmed in this, IMAX 70mm quality so if anyone wants to experience how that feels they should definitely grab an IMAX screen and get a glimpse of how the highest ever film quality feels from a viewer's eyes.

It's crazy how 200 years ago, taking videos from your life and storing them was still considered a pipe dream, and now we have cameras so advanced that we can make an actual movie with the simple, 500-gram camera phone that we carry in our pockets. If you went back and told your ancestors, with their cameras that were as big as a closet and weighed as much as your television, that this would someday be possible they would call you crazy. It's fascinating, how we hold the power to capture a moment and mark the moment, the day to be forever. It's fascinating how, now, due to the cameras, we hold the power to embed our memories in stone. Immortalize them. Every bit I learn about history, all I'm left with in the end is a speechless expression and more and more reasons to be grateful. So here's to cameras, the devices that let us relive some of the moments that we hold on to more than life itself. Because sometimes pictures say what words cannot.