Modern Magic

You've got a metal, specifically silver. You've got a halogen, specifically one of the elements on the periodic table that starts with fluorine and moves down that specific row--chlorine, bromine, iodine, and two other less common elements. Silver and a halogen, and we'll call it a silver halide. When a silver halide molecule is struck with a packet of energy, say, a photon, it has the unique property that one of it's electrons gets bumped into a different orbit. This different level of electron orbit causes the silver halide to be attracted to a silver ion, a positively or negatively charged atom of silver, and a silver "metallic spec" is created when the juiced silver halide combines with the silver ion.

That's a lot of scientific talk. To sum it up: one molecule is hit by a photon (light particle), it then becomes attracted to a charged atom of metal, and the meeting of the two produce what's called a metallic spec, an effect to the silver halide's crystalline structure.

Switching gears, imagine an ice-cube tray that's painted in an alternating pattern of green, red, and blue, and imagine if you were to throw green, red, and blue marbles at the ice cube tray and also that the marbles would only land in their associated color's slot. Make sense? A red marble can only go into a red slot, green to green and blue to blue.

The ice-cube tray is more mechanical than magical, while the silver halide is scientifically magical.

This modern magic of which I speak is simply image capture--photography.

When photography was in its infancy it was a very intriguing time to be involved in heady subjects. The line between "scientific" and "magical" was as blurry as a poorly focused lens. It seems silly now to think of almost anything as magical...maybe I'm just a cynic, or a realist, or a "science guy" who believes that the large portion of experiencable things can be explained through study and tests and equations and expressions.

But try to imagine what the discovery of photography would have sounded like to you the first time someone would have tried to explain it. In essence you mix metal and light and get an image, an image of whatever the metal was facing.

How absolutely fascinating. This is something we folks living in the second decade of the twenty-first century take for granted. We can go to any grocery store or drug store and get disposable apparatuses that will mix metal and light and give you images.

Metal and light, man!

One of my favorite novels, if not my favorite novel ever, Against the Day, has this time period, the period of the blending of science and magic and psychology and mathematics, as its main time frame. Another thing from earlier in my life covered this same basic time span, with it's ever increasing search for the Next Big Thing, a television show called The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr.

Anything's possible if you can mix metal and light and get images.

The first actual permanent photograph was made by a French guy using not silver halides, but rather bitumen, an asphalt like material. Whatever photosensitive material you use, the act of taking an exposed surface and turning the image from latent (ie invisible) to permanent (the picture of the captured image) is to wash the unexposed light sensitive material away from the exposed material. With that first picture on the bitumen the French guy used linseed oil.

When photography as we recognize it today really got going was when they discovered the "wash", hyposulfite, a chemical that could fix the latent image (by forcing all of those tiny metallic specs to solidify into silver metal) and then wash off all residual silver halide crystals and keep the thing from getting ruined by overexposure.

Color photography on light sensitive film is basically the same, but with different elements mixed into the gelatin bonding agent that fixes the silver halide crystals to the paper/film. They also tend to be at different depths, different layers on the film paper, to represent the different levels of energy, and thus the penetrating ability, of the light. Higher energy, blue light, is under the lower energy layers (red and green).

Switching gears, let's look again at that color coded ice-cube tray. That's essentially how all digital camera sensors work. There are many more green slots than red or blue, which are at the extremes of the visible light spectrum, and how the photons are turned into images, how each picture element, or pixel, is digitized into an image is what literally separates the different companies. It's really how well does a camera guess at the actual image, since it can't get the full spectrum that silver halides suspended in a substrate of gelatin can.

In fact, sadly or ironically, our eye works more like a digital camera; our retinas with those rods and cones are closer in function to that color coded ice-cube tray.

A century ago taking pictures was still novel and amazing. It wasn't brand new anymore, but it was available to everyone just yet. Today, plenty of people in this country carry a camera in their pocket and take it for granted, retrieving it to snap a picture of something funny or silly or endearing or maddening. That that camera can also contact other people and allow the holder to speak with, or simply write to instantly, another person anywhere on this planet is another wonder that's largely taken for granted.

If you get a chance, check out The Light Farm. They're not so much a company as a clearing house for data on making your own silver halide gelatin and putting it onto glass plates. They've recreated the dawn of the amateur photographer. If anything, I'd suggest looking at some of their gallery links. Old timey, for certain.

Also, Hercules Florence. Besides having a very cool name, he is the Leibniz to Herschel's Newton. He independently discovered the negative image method that is still used today and even chose the word photographie for the same reasons Herschel chose virtually the same word (from the Greek photo meaning "light" and graphie meaning "to write"). He just had the misfortune to be living in Brazil at the time of his discovery and has been largely ignored. He happened to be before Herschel but after the French bitumen guy, Niepce.

And, for full collections of my blatherings on the topic of picturing, see:
Photographic Vignetting
Camera Follies
Holga Realizations
The Light Field Camera