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Police Photography Reviewer (Definition of Terms)

Forensic Photography Reviewer

Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham) - a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000 AD, invented the first pinhole camera, (also called the Camera Obscura } and was able to explain why the images were upside down.

Angelo Sala - a self educated chemist, he discovered that when paper contained powdered silver nitrate it would react with sunlight, causing it to darken. These pioneering experiments with silver salts were a
crucial step towards the later invention of photography. He published his findings in a pamphlet in 1614.

Anna Atkins - (1799- 1871) an English Botanist, she is considered to be the first female photographer.

Aristotle - he observed and noted the first casual reference to the optic laws that made pinhole cameras possible, around 330 BC, he questioned why the sun could make a circular image when it shined
through a square hole.

Arthur Fellig - (Weegee) became famous because of his frequent, seemingly prescient arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities.

Carl William Scheele - (1742-1786) Swedish scientist, self-educated. He used to work as an assistant in pharmacies and showed a talent in chemistry from a very young age. In spite an offer made to him to
study in London or Berlin, he operated a pharmacy in Kφping where he spend the rest of his life and made all his important inventions. He was especially interest on chemical analysis and worked particularly with the chemical reactions between silver nitrate and sunlight, therefore making a break through in the chemistry of photography. The records from his experiments were of a great importance for the next generations of scientists.

Digital photography - uses an array of electronic photo detectors to capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film.

Emulsion - is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (nonmixable or unblendable). Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids.

Exposure - is the amount of light per unit area (the image plane illuminance times the exposure time) reaching a photographic film, as determined by shutter speed, lens aperture and scene luminance.

Film Speed - is the measure of a photographic film's sensitivity to light, determined by sensitometry and measured on various numerical scales, the most recent being the ISO system.

Forensic Photography - (forensic imaging)(crime scene photography) it is the art of producing an accurate reproduction of a crime scene or an accident scene using photography for the benefit of a court or to aid in an investigation.

Frederick Scoff Archer - an English sculptor who invented the wet plate negative in 1851. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass
and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.

Gelatin - It is used to hold silver halide crystals in an emulsion in virtually all photographic films and photographic papers.

George Eastman - he invented in 1889 a film with a base that was flexible, unbreakable, and could be rolled. Emulsions coated on a cellulose nitrate film base, such as Eastman's, made the mass-produced
box camera a reality.

Hamilton Smith - he patented in 1856 the Tintypes, another medium that heralded the birth of photography. A thin sheet of iron was used to provide a base for light-sensitive material, yielding a positive image.

---Tintypes - are a variation of the collodion wet plate process. The emulsion is painted onto a japanned (varnished) iron plate, which is exposed in the camera.

Heliographs - (sun prints) were the prototype for the modern photograph.

Henry Fox Talbot - an English botanist and mathematician and The inventor of the first negative from which multiple postive prints were made.

Hercules Florence - (1804-1879) Few details are known for his life. In 1824 goes to Brazil and takes part in a scientific mission at the Amazon, where he becomes preoccupied with the idea of recording images from his trip. From 1830 devotes himself to research and experimentation for photography. The above, gives Brazil the ability to claim that is one of the places in the world, where photography
was found.

Hippolyte Bayard - (1807-1887) The most unfortunate from the pioneers of photography. Discovered one direct positive photographic method. He was the first person to hold a photographic exhibition (for
humanitarian reasons) and the first who combined two negatives to created one print (called Combination Printing). As a civil servant and with five hundred franks that received as financial help from Arago for improving his method, prevented him from presenting the discovery of photography at the French Academy of Sciences.


History of Photography - Timeline

      Ancient Times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in
      darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole

      16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by
      enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens

      17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made
      portable in the form of sedan chairs

      1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in
      a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight.
      Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.

      1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects
      on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated
      rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.

      1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with
      photosensitive paper

      1826: Niépce creates a permanent image

      1827: Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first known photographic
      image using the camera obscura. The camera obscura was a tool
      used by artists to draw.

      1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using
      paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution.
      Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another
      sheet of paper.

      1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated
      with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is
      awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for
      publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use
      the Daguerreotype process.

      1841: Talbot patents his process under the name "calotype".

      1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves
      photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion
      (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on
      sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper
      than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited
      reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.

      1853: Nadar (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris

      1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris,
      leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade

      1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era

      1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal
      (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.

      1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color
      photography system involving three black and white photographs, each
      taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned
      into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color
      filters. This is the "color separation" method.

      1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American
      Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives

      1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods
      for color photography.

      1870: Center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers
      out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William
      Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.

      1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of
      an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the
      "dry plate" process.

      1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge,
      settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once"
      bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of
      Leland Stanford's horse.

      1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.

      1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in
      Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily
      newspaper, the New York Graphic.

      1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough
      for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.

      1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper

      1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of
      tenament life in New york City

      1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.

      1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in
      New York City

      1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and
      therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P.
      Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of
      the North American Indian.

      1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates,
      manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France

      1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to
      photograph children working mills.

      1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz,
      develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm
      movie film.

      1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon,
      established in Tokyo.

      1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing
      objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a
      distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to
      photograph the brothels of Paris

      1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as
      the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.

      1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he
      begins an 11-year project photographing street life

      1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful,
      close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects;
      Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6
      cm image on rollfilm.; Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature

      1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton
      at MIT

      1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and
      white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters;
      Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston,
      et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought
      and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a
      60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman,
      aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and
      shoots himself.

      1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit

      1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and
      lenses in addition to film.

      1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a
      historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange,
      Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next
      six years. Roman Vishniac begins his project of the soon-to-be-killed
      -by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.

      1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color
      film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex
      (SLR) camera
            World War II: Development of multi-layer color negative films
            Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene
            Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine

      1940s - in the early 1940's commercially viable color films
      (except Kodachrome, introduced in 1935) were brought to the market.
      These films used the modern technology of dye-coupled colors in
      which a chemical process connects the three dye layers together
      to create an apparent color image.

      1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the
      photographer-owned Magnum picture agency

      1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for
      commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm;
      Polaroid sells instant black and white film

      1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an
      unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder

      1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's
      Museum of Modern Art

      1959: Nikon F introduced.

      1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of
      New York City.

      1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic
      released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the
      Nikonos

      1970: William Wegman begins photographing his Weimaraner, Man Ray.

      1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame

      1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22

      1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife
      and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds
      the first working CCD-based digital still camera

      1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern
      Art, William Eggleston's Guide

      1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed
      in 1980; Jan Groover begins
      exploring kitchen utensils

      1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins work on seascapes.

      1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid.

      1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera

      1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same
      as in the Minox spy camera)

      1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called
      "Maxxum" in the US); In the American West by Richard Avedon

      1988: Sally Mann begins publishing nude photos of her children

      1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new
      all-electronic lens mount

      1990: Adobe Photoshop released.

      1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3

      1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD

      1993: Founding of photo.net (this Web site), an early Internet online
      community; Sebastiao Salgado publishes Workers; Mary Ellen Mark
      publishes book documenting life in an Indian circus.

      1995: Material World, by Peter Menzel published.

      1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics

      1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR
      design by a leading manufacturer.

      2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone

      2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt

      2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with
      the Olympus E-1; Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000

      2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras

      2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR,
      with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000; Portraits by Rineke Dijkstra

Infrared Photography - the film or image sensor used is sensitive to infrared light.

Johann Heinrich Schulze - (1687 - 1744) he was a German professor at the University of Altdorf. He was the first person to produce Photograms, which were created by using paper masks in direct contact
with a jar containing a mixture of silver nitrate powder and chalk. Schulze proved that the darkening of silver nitrate was caused by light and ruled out the possibility of the change being caused by temperature, by observing no tonal change to silver nitrate when heated in an oven.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce - made the first photographic image with a camera obscura.

Latent Image - is an invisible image produced by the exposure to light of a photosensitive material such as photographic film.

Louis Daguerre - a Frenchman and A professional scene painter,  was able to reduce exposure time to less than 30 minutes and keep the image from disappearing afterwards. He was the inventor of the first practical process of photography.

Mugshot - (police photograph)(booking photograph) is a photographic
portrait typically taken after a person is arrested.

Negative - is an image, usually on a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film, in which the lightest areas of the photographed subject appear darkest and the darkest areas appear lightest.

Parallax - is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those
two lines.

Photography - It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.

Photographic Film - (Film) is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals.

Point-and-Shoot Camera - (compact camera) is a still camera designed primarily for simple operation.[1] Most use focus free lenses or autofocus for focusing, automatic systems for setting the exposure options, and have flash units built in.

Rogues Gallery - is a police collection of pictures or photographs of criminals and suspects kept for identification purposes.

Shutter Lag - is the delay between triggering the shutter and when the photograph is actually recorded.

Shutter Speed - (exposure time) is the length of time a camera's shutter is open when taking a photograph.

Silver Halides - The light-sensitive chemicals used in photographic film and paper.

Single-Lens Reflex Camera (SLR) - typically uses a mirror and prism system (hence "reflex", from the mirror's reflection) that permits the photographer to view through the lens and see exactly what will
be captured, contrary to viewfinder cameras where the image could be significantly different from what will be captured.

Sir Humphry Davy - (1778-1829) Chemistry genius, friend and assistant of Wedgwood in his experiments whose results were published at Royal Society, in 1802 by Davy. The problem of "fixing" the images remained in spite of Davy's breakthroughs in chemistry.

Sir John F.W. Herschel - a scientist who first used the word photography in 1839. The word photography was derived from the Greek words Photos, which means light and Graphein, which means to draw.

Snapshot - is popularly defined as a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent.

Thomas Wedgwood - (1771 - 1805) an Englishman who made good ground creating Photograms and recording images from his Camera Obscura or pinhole camera, However, he never overcome the problem of fixing the image and therefore the prints produced had to be viewed for very short periods of time in a darkened environment.

Twin-Lens Reflex Camera (TLR) - is a type of camera with two objective lenses of the same focal length.

Viewfinder - is what the photographer looks through to compose, and in many cases to focus, the picture.