WEEK 01

Topic: Abandon Photography Museum

    "Abandon Photography Museum" will be the topic that I decided to work on. The mindset that led me to do this topic is the thought of photography taken by unpopular photographers and people who have interests in photography. Nowadays, from my experience so far, both popular and unpopular photographers post their works on a social network called Instagram. From this social network, how they expand their work for the audience to see is through hashtags. But this came to my mind, the audiences could only see the art of photography through their screens, what kind of feelings and point of view did the audiences have? On top of that people have different types of electronic devices to view the photography works which means the outcome colours of the works are different from each of the audiences' devices. It's not like they really want to print the works out, because different kind of ink and paper factors in the final outcome of the works.

    In my opinion, photography could be anything and it can be captured everywhere. It can be photographed with anything, phones and cameras from the cheapest to the most expensive. What's important are the memories and the feelings of the photography when they took the photographs. In this case, anyone who has interests in photography and photographs can have their works exhibited in this museum. The works they submit to be exhibited doesn't have to be perfect as long as the memories and feelings can be delivered to the audiences. Here, people could express their memories and feelings through a photograph. Seeing that these days, people are more focused on the device to take the photograph, expensive phones and cameras. 

Untold memories and feelings that they would like to share through photographs.

Research about Photograph

    A photograph (also known as a photo) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a smartphone/camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The word photograph was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek phos, meaning "light," and graphê, meaning "drawing, writing," together meaning "drawing with light."

    The first permanent photograph, a contact-exposed copy of an engraving, was made in 1822 using the bitumen-based "heliography" process developed by Nicéphore Niépce. The first photographs of a real-world scene, made using a camera obscura, followed a few years later at Le Gras, France, in 1826, but Niépce's process was not sensitive enough to be practical for that application: a camera exposure lasting for hours or days was required. In 1829 Niépce entered into a partnership with Louis Daguerre and the two collaborated to work out a similar but more sensitive and otherwise improved process.

    After Niépce's death in 1833 Daguerre concentrated on silver halide-based alternatives. He exposed a silver-plated copper sheet to iodine vapour, creating a layer of light-sensitive silver iodide; exposed it in the camera for a few minutes; developed the resulting invisible latent image to visibility with mercury fumes; then bathed the plate in a hot salt solution to remove the remaining silver iodide, making the results light-fast. He named this first practical process for making photographs with a camera the daguerreotype, after himself. Its existence was announced to the world on 7 January 1839 but working details were not made public until 19 August. Other inventors soon made improvements that reduced the required exposure time from a few minutes to a few seconds, making portrait photography truly practical and widely popular.

    The daguerreotype had shortcomings, notably the fragility of the mirror-like image surface and the particular viewing conditions required to see the image properly. Each was a unique opaque positive that could only be duplicated by copying it with a camera. Inventors set about working out improved processes that would be more practical. By the end of the 1850s, the daguerreotype had been replaced by the less expensive and more easily viewed ambrotype and tintype, which made use of the recently introduced collodion process. Glass plate collodion negatives used to make prints on albumen paper soon became the preferred photographic method and held that position for many years, even after the introduction of the more convenient gelatin process in 1871. Refinements of the gelatin process have remained the primary black-and-white photographic process to this day, differing primarily in the sensitivity of the emulsion and the support material used, which was originally glass, then a variety of flexible plastic films, along with various types of paper for the final prints.

    Colour photography is almost as old as black-and-white, with early experiments including John Herschel's Anthotype prints in 1842, the pioneering work of Louis Ducos du Hauron in the 1860s, and the Lippmann process unveiled in 1891, but for many years colour photography remained little more than a laboratory curiosity. It first became a widespread commercial reality with the introduction of Autochrome plates in 1907, but the plates were very expensive and not suitable for casual snapshot-taking with hand-held cameras. The mid-1930s saw the introduction of Kodachrome and Agfacolor Neu, the first easy-to-use colour films of the modern multi-layer chromogenic type. These early processes produced transparencies for use in slide projectors and viewing devices, but colour prints became increasingly popular after the introduction of chromogenic colour print paper in the 1940s. The needs of the motion picture industry generated a number of special processes and systems, perhaps the best-known being the now-obsolete three-strip Technicolor process.

    Non-digital photographs are produced with a two-step chemical process. In the two-step process, the light-sensitive film captures a negative image (colours and lights/darks are inverted). To produce a positive image, the negative is most commonly transferred ('printed') onto photographic paper. Printing the negative onto transparent film stock is used to manufacture motion picture films. Alternatively, the film is processed to invert the negative image, yielding positive transparencies. Such positive images are usually mounted in frames, called slides. Before recent advances in digital photography, transparencies were widely used by professionals because of their sharpness and accuracy of colour rendition. Most photographs published in magazines were taken on colour transparency film.

    Originally, all photographs were monochromatic or hand-painted in colour. Although methods for developing colour photos were available as early as 1861, they did not become widely available until the 1940s or 1950s, and even so, until the 1960s most photographs were taken in black and white. Since then, colour photography has dominated popular photography, although black and white is still used, being easier to develop than colour.

    Panoramic format images can be taken with cameras like the Hasselblad Xpan on standard film. Since the 1990s, panoramic photos have been available on the Advanced Photo System (APS) film. APS was developed by several of the major film manufacturers to provide a film with different formats and computerized options available, though APS panoramas were created using a mask in panorama-capable cameras, far less desirable than a true panoramic camera, which achieves its effect through a wider film format. APS has become less popular and has been discontinued. 

    The advent of the microcomputer and digital photography has led to the rise of digital prints. These prints are created from stored graphic formats such as JPEG, TIFF, and RAW. The types of printers used include inkjet printers, dye-sublimation printer, laser printers, and thermal printers. Inkjet prints are sometimes given the coined name "Giclée".

Available Printing Mediums

- Fabric

- Poster

- Acrylic

- Metal

- Paper

- Rice Paper

- Wood

- Foam Board

REFLECTIONS

    For this week, I researched a lot of issues and information regarding photography, photographer, and photographs. By searching and reading it, I could understand better about this topic and even more curious.