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Definition: photography from Collins English Dictionary

n

1 the process of recording images on sensitized material by the action of light, X-rays, etc, and the chemical processing of this material to produce a print, slide, or cine film

2 the art, practice, or occupation of taking and printing photographs, making cine films, etc

photography, still

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
science and art of making permanent images on light-sensitive materials. See also photographic processing ; motion picture photography ; motion pictures . The camera itself is based on optical principles known at least since the age of Aristotle; indeed, a filmless version was in use in the mid-1500s as a sketching device for artists. Called the camera obscura (Lat.,=dark chamber), it consisted of a small, lightproof box with a pinhole or lens on one side and a translucent screen on the opposite side. This screen registered, in a manner suitable for tracing, the inverted image transmitted through the lens. The human eye was the prototype for this device, which functioned as a primitive extension of seeing. Most experiments in photographic technology were directed toward perfecting the medium as a surrogate, more sophisticated eye. The necessary first breakthrough in photography was in a different, not eye-centered area—that of making permanent photographic images. Employing data from…
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Photography
The first true photographs were created in France in 1827 by the physicist Nicéphore Niepce (1765–1833) and were called heliographs . It had been known for some time that some chemicals, such as silver chloride or silver iodide, were sensitive to light and Niepce made use of this. He exposed paper…
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Full text Article photography

From Encyclopedia of Intelligence & Counterintelligence
The miniature Minox has been a favorite spy...
Like cryptography, photography has played a vital role in the world of intelligence, using the art and science of the craft to interpret intelligence. In the United States, there are numerous organizations that concern themselves with the intelligence applications of photography. Most of these…
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Fashion retail adverts on the Tokyo skyline
How do we come to know cities without having physically experienced them? Visual images of cities can travel to us through television, the cinema and photographs, which are then distributed through various forms, such as cinema multiplexes, DVDs, the internet, newspapers, magazines, postcards and…
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Full text Article photography

From Collins Dictionary of Astronomy
The process of capturing light and other electromagnetic radiation reflected or transmitted from an object and chemically recording it as an image on emulsion-coated film or glass plates. Few professional astronomers employ traditional photographic methods any longer, using instead the modern…
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Full text Article photography

From Philip's Encyclopedia
Process of obtaining a permanent image of an object, either in black-and-white or in colour, on treated paper or film. A camera is used to expose a film to an image of the object to be photographed, for a set time. In black-and-white photography, the film is covered on one side with an emulsion…
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Full text Article Photography

From Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications Full text Article Contents by Subject Area
I. Introduction II. Historical Roots III. Technical Considerations IV. Ethical Concerns V. Cultural Significance VI. Conclusions GLOSSARY decisive moment A concept developed by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in which the perfect time for the taking of an image is that instant in which…
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Full text Article photography

From The Penguin Dictionary of Physics
The production of permanent images by use of sensitized emulsions. Light falling on a photographic emulsion sets up a photoelectric chain of events in which some silver ions belonging to silver salts in the emulsion are converted to neutral silver atoms. In the development of this latent image , a…
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Full text Article photography

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology and photography have been integrally entwined since the emergence of both the discipline and the medium in the nineteenth century (Pinney 1992). The earliest photographic images used by anthropologists were seldom taken by them, but acquired from wide range of sources, such as…
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Full text Article PHOTOGRAPHY

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
Photography, from the Greek words phos, photos , light and graphein , to write: ‘light-writing'. Photography, the ‘pencil of nature’ in the traditional conceit (William Fox Talbot's compendium of photographs from 1844 uses this expression as a framing title). As Henry Hitchings observes, the word is…
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A relatively young art, less than 150 years old, photography began its life in optico-chemical technology but its medium is already being transformed by recent digital technology. The exact nature of this transformation and its effect on mainstay problems in the ontology and epistemology of…
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