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Cameras/Accessories
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Camera bodies
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Camera kits
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Flash units
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Camera lenses
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Motor Drives
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Digital Camcorders
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Digital Cameras
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Camcorders
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Tripods and accessories
*This website contains only a sample and small variety of merchandise we have
for sale. Please if you can't find what you are looking for on this
website, do not hesitate to call (604)859-2518
and speak with a representative. New inventory is shelved everyday!
Brief history of cameras
The word photography is derived from the Greek words for
light and writing. Sir John Herschel, was the first to use the term
"Photography". This was in 1839, the year the photographic process
became public. There are two distinct scientific processes that
combine to make photography possible. These processes had been known
for quite some time, so it is somewhat surprising that photography
was not invented earlier than the 1830s. It was not until the two
distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography
came into being.
The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room)
had
been in existence for at least four hundred years. The second
process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was
invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colors are
bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between
how heat, air, and light created reactions.
In the sixteen hundreds Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society, had
reported that silver chloride turned dark under exposure. He believe
that it was caused by exposure to the air, rather than to light.
Angelo Sala, in the early seventeenth century, noticed that the sun
blackened powdered nitrate of silver. In 1727 Johann Heinrich
Schulze discovered that when exposed to light, certain liquids
change color. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Thomas
Wedgwood was conducting experiments with pictures. He had
successfully captured images, but his silhouettes wouldn't stay, as
there was no known method of making the image permanent.
Niépce successfully produced a picture in July of 1827. He used a
material that hardened on exposure to light. The down side is that
the picture required an 8 hour exposure. Niépce agreed to go into
partnership with Lousi Daguerre on January 4, 1829. Although Niépce
died 4 years later, Daguerre continued to experiment. Daguerre
discovered a way of developing photographic plates. This process
would greatly reduce the amount of exposure time. Instead of 8 hours
it would only take half an hour. Daguerre also discovered that by
dipping it in salt the image could be made permanent. The
Daguerreotype was bought by the French Government and made public on
Aug. 19, 1839.
William Henry Talbot had an invention called the Calotype. The Calotype
produced a negative picture on paper. That means the lights were
recorded as darks, and the darks as lights. The positive was made on
another sheet of chemically sensitized paper, exposed to light
through the negative. An infinite number of positives could be made
from a single negative so Talbot's invention and refinements of it
predominated.
Photographers were like artists because they recorded contemporary events
only with greater flexibility and on a much greater scale. One of
the first photographic documents of history-in-the-making was also
the greatest. This was the American Civil War. These were made by 20
photographers. Most of them were initially under the direction of
Mathew B. Brady. They could not yet capture the action of battle
with their big equipment, but their blunt views of landscapes,
littered with the dead changed the popular vision of war.
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