Turkish

Buse Münevver Sargin

Ahmet Eren Anadolu Lisesi, Kayseri, Turkey

Hundreds of years ago, it took a hard work to get photos made. Now, it only takes a few seconds to get them. This change has been the result of the development of camera after a lot of efforts and researches.

On the first camera, many innovations and experiments were carried out regarding the way human eye worked. Since the 11^th century, people have worked in view of the idea of camera obscura which means dark room in Latin. According to Leonardo Da Vinci, one of great artist of the Renaissance, camera obscura was introduced in this way:

If a small hole is dug on the wall of a shady house when the sun lights up a building or a square, the images of all the objects illuminated are transmitted through the hole and the images appear on the wall inside the home, upside down.

Camera obscura was an entirely isolated, dark room on which there was only a small hole on a simple wall to enable the light to pass through and it was big enough for only one person. The light reflected by the objects in front of the wall with the hole went inside and the image appeared on the opposite wall. Then, the one who was to transfer the image to a paper drew it placing the paper on the image. In this way, it was possible to work on a picture that had proper perspective. Most evident inconvenient of camera obscura was that the images were upside down.

In the 16^th century, camera obscura was easier to carry because its size became smaller. In 1550, Gardano placed a double sided lens into the dark box. Who was to transfer the image to the paper stayed out of the dark box and that caused a problem. In 1558, Porto reported that it would be possible to use the black box without any failure by transferring the image to the paper from frosted glass.

The brightness and clearness of the image relied on how wide the hole in the middle of the box was. In 1568, Daniel Barbaro recommended adding a diaphragm in order to get the image when the hole got wider.

The larger the size of the image, the wider the gap appeared between the hole in the black box and the surface on which the image appeared. This problem was also solved by using object glass. The sizes of the images changed with object glasses having different focal distances. In 1572, Danti recommended using concave glass to correct the image. In the 17^th century, the image was corrected by changing the direction of the light with an uneven glass. Consequently, it was possible to transfer the image to the paper properly. However, the image might change when the objects moved. For a long time, images had been thought to be formed by the dark box formed on their own and were permanent. With this aim, the thing which now we call film was developed. Hence, the dark boxes turned into cameras.

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