35mm Photography :Tracing Back the History

The concept of photography, exposing light to a silver based medium to create a negative, has made people thinking of building a portable darkroom to store the negatives so that they won’t be ruined by the sunlight. They were thinking to build a camera. When we talking about camera in the early 20 century, we’re talking about a huge wooden box that was mounted on a huge wooden tripod, so heavy that a photographer at that time must have an assistant to help carry the camera. The negatives were also huge. Made out of glass plate filled with silver and other light-sensitive materials, the smallest size of these glasses are 8x10 inch which until now are still in use ( for large format photography, no longer plate though, but film.), but most of the time the photographer use a negative that as big as the final print would be.

This idea of large format is not very portable, the camera is heavy, the setup takes long time, many people but professional wouldn’t dare to ‘kill’ himself lugging

One of the people that really put his thought and mind to develop this small portable camera and negatives was Oscar Barnack. He worked at the Leica company in German. Leica is one of the biggest Lens industry in the world, was formed in 1849, had contributed many advancement in lenses industry, microscopes, telescopes, binoculars, and of course, cameras.

The film 24mm x36mm was created by doubling the cinema film format. After several tests and research Oscar Barnack found that the new format, had the quality to hold photographic data for a long time, and the quality was also comparable to the glass plate film.

Some topics in this essay:
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