Photography is the art , application, and practice of creating images by recording light , either electronically by means of an image sensor , or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing e. 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.
With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel , which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with 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. Before the emergence of digital photography , photographs on film had to be developed to produce negatives or projectable slides, and negatives had to be printed as positive images, usually in enlarged form.
This was usually done by photographic laboratories, but many amateurs did their own processing. Several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. The first use of the word by Florence became widely known after the research of Boris Kossoy in The German newspaper Vossische Zeitung of 25 February contained an article entitled Photographie , discussing several priority claims โ especially Henry Fox Talbot 's โ regarding Daguerre's claim of invention.
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, relating to seeing an image and capturing the image. The discovery of the camera obscura "dark chamber" in Latin that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham Alhazen โ also invented a camera obscura as well as the first true pinhole camera.
