May I come in ! ? ! ~ seeing the other side !!

Excuse me !  can I come in ? – the cow seemingly is asking ?? – can you image the full picture ?  Heard of heliography, which translates as “sun drawing.”

 

Do you remember watching Test matches on Doordarshan ?  in that Pongal test of Jan 1975 (telecast live) – two fast bowlers (a luxury of those days) – Karsan Ghavri & Madanlal opened the attack. Ghavri scalped Roy Fredricks – the fact that they bowled 8 overs in between them in the 1^st innings and 4 in the 2^nd essay is not the subject matter of this post !! 

We watched Madanlal running in, jump and deliver while Karsan Ghavri ran away from us to deliver.  In the first we saw WI batters back while in the second their face !  - yes, those days, there was a single camera broadcasting the test match and .. .. .. DD was paying for that ! 

As a means of visual communication and expression, photography has distinct aesthetic capabilities. But what we see may not be the full picture (no reference to full frame here!) – you are seeing the subject from the eyes of a photographer.  Here is a Cow seeking entry to Pradhan house in Triplicane ? 

The history of the camera and their evolution is so interesting as today’s cameras are much different from what used to be fairly crude looking instruments. It has been dominated by modern inventions like digital single lens reflex cameras which are the improved versions of its more traditional single lens reflex siblings, digital point and shoot cameras which you can carry conveniently in your pocket, and even smartphone cameras which come as almost standard feature of every good mobile instrument. 

Long long ago, humans tried recording image of objects   through the action of light, or related radiation, on a light-sensitive material. The word, derived from the Greek photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”), was first used in the 1830s. 

The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a dark chamber or room with a hole (later a lens) in one wall, through which images of objects outside the room were projected on the opposite wall. The principle was probably known to ancient Greeks such as Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. Late in the 16th century, the Italian scientist and writer Giambattista della Porta demonstrated and described in detail the use of a camera obscura with a lens.

In 1727 the German professor of anatomy Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts, a phenomenon known since the 16th century and possibly earlier, was caused by light and not heat. He demonstrated the fact by using sunlight to record words on the salts, but he made no attempt to preserve the images permanently. His discovery, in combination with the camera obscura, provided the basic technology necessary for photography. It was not until the early 19th century, however, that photography actually came into being. 

Nicéphore Niépce, an amateur inventor living near Chalon-sur-Saône, a city 189 miles (304 km) southeast of Paris, was interested in lithography, a process in which drawings are copied or drawn by hand onto lithographic stone and then printed in ink. Not artistically trained, Niépce devised a method by which light could draw the pictures he needed. He oiled an engraving to make it transparent and then placed it on a plate coated with a light-sensitive solution of bitumen of Judea (a type of asphalt) and lavender oil and exposed the setup to sunlight. After a few hours, the solution under the light areas of the engraving hardened, while that under the dark areas remained soft and could be washed away, leaving a permanent, accurate copy of the engraving. Calling the process heliography (“sun drawing”), Niépce succeeded from 1822 onward in copying oiled engravings onto lithographic stone, glass, and zinc and from 1826 onto pewter plates. 

Life has changed a lot, and now-a-days, every one of us carry a Camera (embedded in a smart phone), mostly forget objects and shoot selfies.  Here is the other side of Cow entry – the man in frame, MA Narasimhan of Triplicane, who loves Cows, Sparrows, Crows, and people.  Animals and birds come searching for him.  Other day saw a Crow just pulling one end of veshti drawing his attention and taking food from him.

 
Regards – S Sampathkumar
6.11.2024