A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects

The fuzzy but identifiable View from the Window at Le Gras (above left, 1826) was the first image actually captured by a camera obscura. Plate cameras (above right) were good enough for Henry Charles Clarke Wright to preserve the appearance in life of the now-extinct Laughing Owl from New Zealand (top).

A simple box with a hole in one end to let in light and a flat surface or screen at the other, where a colour image of the box’s surroundings is projected upside down, some form of camera obscura has been known since around 2,400 BP, when it was mentioned in the surviving writings of the Chinese philosopher and founder of Mohism, Mozi (aka Mo Tzu). It is also mentioned not long after in a work by Aristotle (see pages 18–19).

By the 16th century, primitive lenses were being added to the entry hole, and they are believed to have been used as a drawing aid by Dutch painters including Vermeer. However, the projection of such images onto a light-sensitive surface resulted in the first permanent imprint of an image, when French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured View from the Window at Le Gras on a bitumen-coated plate in 1826, though other processes like photogravure and lithography had been experimented with just a few years earlier.

Niépce formed a research partnership with Louis Daguerre, but it was not until after the former had died in 1833 that Daguerre managed to develop the first true photographic technique, which he termed, naturally, the daguerreotype. This technique involved making a true-life oriented or positive image on a silver-coated copper plate, but due to the lengthy exposure needed to obtain an image, the subjects were largely portraits or still lifes.

The development of wider lenses and refinements in the chemistry used kept shortening the exposure time, and the Dubroni camera of 1864, using the collodion wet plate process, enabled photographers to prepare their own plates inside the camera itself. Plate cameras into the early 20th century still took the form of large varnished boxes familiar from silent movies, more like items of furniture than the portable cameras we have taken for granted since the period between the two world wars.

However, these somewhat large and impractical cameras were also used for bird photography by the late 19th century, and have provided an invaluable record of what some relatively recently extinct species actually looked like in life, including captive Passenger Pigeons taken in 1896 and 1898, and the now-extinct endemic Laughing Owl from New Zealand, which was possibly photographed as early as 1889.