photographer is a person who takes a photograph using a camera. This person is generally considered the artist, because he or she constructed the appearance of the product in the same way as any other visual artists. One may be an amateur photographer or a professional photographer if he or she uses photography to make a living. The work of a photographer may be limited to the actual shooting of the camera, or it may include all of the steps in the development of the image up to the presentation of the final product. A photograph may be the work of a single person or a team. The most common teams are formed of a photographer and a laboratory technician. The laboratory work (photographic processing, image processing, plus other less common techniques) can completely change the appearance of a shot. The artistry can just as easily be in the lab work as in the shooting itself, even if 
the one who took the shot is more likely to be considered the artist, and the developer an artisan.
Before all a photographer is, like a painter, an artist of a vision. The technique follows, more or less faithfully, in reconstructing, even transforming, that original vision. The photographer often has a certain personality which is expressed in his or her work. At the beginning of the photographic era, there were great debates between painters and photographers, and a great number of scholars and patricians interacted in these two areas. If photographers are considered to have "usurped" the exclusive domain of the image from painters, painters have been profoundly influenced by the photographic technique, which oblig
ed them to better define their domain, their subjects, and the flexibility of their technique. However, certain painters have reduced their art to that of a technician in a development lab, using another technique for copying photographs by hand.
Photographers are frequently categorized based on the subjects they photograph. There are photographers of the subjects typical of paintings (landscape, still life, portrait, etc.) as well as documentary photographers, fashion photographers, commercial photographers, etc. Some photographers specialize in a certain type of image, while others are generalists. The distinction between artistic photography and photojournalism or other types of photography and the associated techniques does not remove this personal aspect from the work of the great photographers.
Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium or storage chip through a timed exposure. The process is done through mechanical, chemical or digital devices known as cameras. The word comes from the Greek words φως phos ("light"), and γραφις graphis ("stylus", "paintbrush") or γραφη graphê, together meaning "drawing with light" or "representation by means of lines" or "drawing." Traditionally the product of photography has been called a photograph. The term photo is an abbreviation; many people also call them pictures. In digital photography, the term image has begun to replace photograph. (The term image is traditional in geometric optics.)
A camera or camera obscura is the image-forming device and photographic film or a digital storage card is the recording medium, although other methods are available. For instance, the photocopy or xerography machine forms permanent images but uses the transfer of static electrical charges rather than photographic film, hence the term electrophotography. Rayographs published by Man Ray and others are images produced by the shadows of objects cast on the photographic paper, without the use of a camera. Objects can also be placed directly on the glass of a scanner to produce digital picture
s. Photographers control the camera and lens to expose the light recording material (usually film or a charge-coupled device; a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor may also be used) to the required amount of light. After processing, this produces an image
For centuries images have been projected onto surfaces. Artists used the camera obscura and camera lucida to trace scenes as early as the 16th century. These early cameras did not fix an image, but only projected images from an opening in the wall of a darkened room onto a surface, turning the room into a large pinhole camera. The phrase camera obscura literally means darkened room.
The first photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of 
contributions to the process. He discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapour, before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image. Bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes the image. In 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the Daguerreotype. A similar process is still used today for Polaroids. The French government bought the patent and immediately made it public domain. William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention Talbot refined his process, so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people. By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride to create an intermediate negative image. Unlike a daguerreotype a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, like most chemical films do today. Talbot patented this process, which greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography. Later George Eastman refined Talbot's process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte Bayard had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it, and so was n
ot recognized as its inventor.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process. Photographer and children's author, Lewis Carroll, used this process. Slovene Janez Puhar invented the technical procedure for making photographs on glass in 1841. The invention was recognized on
The Daguerreotype proved popular in responding to the demand for portraiture emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. This demand that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting added to the push for the development of photography. Daguerreotypes, while beautiful, were fragile and difficult to copy. A single photograph ta ken in a
portrait studio could cost USD $1,000 in 2006 dollars. Photographers also encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply, which eventually led them back to Talbot's process. Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman, of
One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a darkroom or processing plant. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed another technique, with three color plates taken in quick succession. Practical application of the technique was held back by the very limited color response of early film; however, in the early 1900s, following the work of photo-chemists such as H. W. Vogel, emulsions with adequate sensitivity to green and red light at last became available. The first color film, Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the market in 190
7. It was based on a 'screen-plate' filter made of dyed dots of potato starch, and was the only color film on the market until German Agfa introduced the similar Agfacolor in 1932. In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern ('integrated tripack') color film, Kodachrome, based on three colored emulsions. This was followed in 1936 by Agfa's Agfacolor Neue. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack process the colour couplers in Agfacolor Neue were integral with the emulsion layers, which greatly simplified the film processing. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based on the Agfacolor Neue technology. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963. As an interesting side note, the inventors of Kodachrome, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. were both accomplished musicians. Godowsky was the brother-in-law of George Gershwin and his father was Leopold Godowsky, one of the world's greatest pianists. Color photography may form images as a positive transparency, intended for use in a slide projector or as color negatives, intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography owing to the introduction of automated photoprinting equipment.
Having fun with photography: manipulation of the scanned print in a graphics program puts these two "brave" people on top of an Austrian cable car.Click on the picture to see the three pictures used.
Traditional photography was a considerable burden for photographers working at remote locations (such as press correspondents) without access to processing facilities. With increased competition from television there was pressure to deliver their images to newspapers with greater speed. Photo-journalists at remote locations would carry a miniature photo lab with them and some means of transmitting their images down the telephone line. In 1981 Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a CCD for imaging, and which required no film -- the Sony Mavica. While the Mavica did save images to disk, the images themselves were displayed on television, and therefore the camera could not be considered fully digital. In 1990, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100, the first commercially available digital camera. Its cost precluded any use other than photojournalism and professional applications, but commercial digital photography was born. Digital photography uses an electronic sensor such as a charge-coupled device to record the image as a piece of electronic data rather than as chemical changes on film. Some other devices, such as cell phones, now include digital photography features. Although not viewed by all photographers as true photography, digital photography in fact meets all requirements to be called such. Even though there are no chemical processes, a digital camera captures a frame of whatever it happens to be poi
nted at, which can be viewed later. In 10 years, digital point and shoot cameras have become widespread consumer products. These digital cameras now outsell film cameras, and many include features not found in film cameras such as the ability to shoot video and record audio. Kodak announced in January 2004 that it would no longer produce reloadable 35 mm cameras after the end of that year. This was interpreted as a sign of the end of film photography. However, Kodak was at that time a minor player on the reloadable film cameras market. In January 2006 Nikon followed suit and announced that they will stop the production of all but two models of their film cameras, they will continue to produce the low-end Nikon FM10, and the high-end Nikon F6. On May 25, 2006 Canon announced they will stop developing new film SLR cameras. The price of 35 mm and APS compact cameras have dropped, probably due to direct competition from digital and the resulting growth of the offer of second-hand film cameras. Ethical concerns arise when discussing digital photography. Many photojournalists have moral reasonings not to crop photos and are forbidden from combining elements of multiple photos to make "illustrations," passing them as real photographs (for example, the photo above of the two men on the cable car). Many courts will not accept digital photographs as evidence as they are easily modified. Today's technology have made picture editing relatively easy for even the novice photographer. While photography editing software may raise ethical issues, even beginners can easily edit color, contrast, exposure and sharpness with the click of a mouse, whereas those same procedures would have taken an extensive amount of time in a traditional darkroom.
