The History Of Photography The name "Photography" comes from the Greek words for light and writing. Sir John Herschel, was the first to use the term photography in 1839, when he managed to fix images using hyposulphite of soda. He described photography as "The application of the chemical rays to the purpose of pictorial representation". Herschel also coined the terms "negative", "positive" and "snapshot".But a man called de la Roche (1729 - 1774), wrote Giphantie and in this imaginary tale, it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky substance and this would produce a mirror image on the sticky canvas, that fixed after it had been dried in the dark.There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible and these two processes have existed for hundreds of years, but it was not until the two they had been put together that photography came into being. The first of these two processes was the Camera Obscura, which had been in existence for at least four hundred years. The second process was chemical. People had been aware, for hundreds of years before photography, that some colours are bleached by the sun, but they made little distinction between heat, air and light.The Camera Obscura, which means Dark Room in Latin, was a dark box or room with a small hole on one wall, which projected an inverted image on the opposite wall. This principle was known by thinkers as early as Aristotle, around 300 BC. In the 10th century, an Arabian scholar Hassan ibn Hassan, described what could be called a camera obscura in his writings "On the form of the Eclipse". He wrote "The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle...". The earliest record of the uses of a camera obscura can be found in ...
