Waaaa, waaaa, waaaaaaaah!” screamed La and Da in terror as they raced out of Ga’s cave hitching up their bear skin tunics so they wouldn’t fall over the freshly killed deer Ga’s brother, Ya, had just dumped at the entrance.
“What’s wrong?” Ya called after them as they disappeared, still screaming at the top of their voices, into the dark and dangerous forest where hungry dinosaurs roamed.
“What happened?” Ya asked Ga who was sitting cross-legged on the cave floor staring at the opposite wall with his mouth hanging open.
“Just look at that” instructed Ga, pointing a trembling finger at the white chalk of the wall which they had all thought to be so pretty when they found their latest cave. “There’s something moving over there. It seems like spirits are living in here too.
La and Da were terrified when I showed them. Well… they are only girls, not brave men like us and where are you going in such a hurry Ya?”
Sitting quietly on his own, Ga studied the flickering shadows playing on the wall trying to decide if they were something to be feared or not. They stayed on the wall, didn’t make a sound, just moved around and drifted from here to there and back again. Suddenly they disappeared and Ga realised that the shaft of sunlight which usually brightened the cave for a short spell in the afternoon had vanished too and he began to think.
Next day, having spent an uncomfortable night alone as his brother Ya and their wives La and Da refused to come back inside, Ga sat down in the same spot as on the previous day and waited. Right on cue, as the sun streamed in through a tiny hole high up in the wall directly opposite the white chalk wall, he saw shapes moving on it again and stared until he was cross-eyed trying to work out what he was seeing. He sat there, at the same time, every single day for three months, lost in thought until the day there was a huge crash and the shadows disappeared. Running out of his cave, he saw that the huge mango tree shading the open meeting space had fallen down and he scratched his scruffy head and smiled. He finally knew the answer to the origin of the shadows but he wasn’t going to tell. He could make his own shadows now and make a good living as a magician. This was going to be fun!
Many thousands of years and generations later, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC to be exact, two of Ga’s descendants, one a philosopher in China and the other a philosopher in Greece, attempted to explain to their widely diverse audiences exactly what is was that Ga had cottoned on to. However, no one really took their lectures on optical illusions and the concepts of camera seriously which is why, in 121BC, yet another Chinese descendant of Ga, recorded in the history books by the name of Shao Ong, was still able to earn a very good living from being a magician.
What Ga had so keenly observed all those centuries before was that concentrated light, in his case a sunbeam, directed through a hole the size of a pin head and onto a light coloured wall, transferred an upside and back-to-front image of what was directly outside as long as the angles involved were correct. He had also noticed that he size of the hole or aperture affected the clarity of the image.
Shao Ong developed this incredible trick of the light even further to create shadow plays, these incorporated angled mirrors to turn the images the right way up and, in no time at all, shadow plays became the in thing throughout China and Asia, which would have made Ga happy coming as he did from what is now Pakistan.
By 180AD an unnamed Chinese descendant of Ga had created a ‘Pipe which makes fantasies appear’, using the same concept but employing a lamp to make animals and ‘creatures’ appear and disappear at will and the creation of the modern camera was brought one step nearer.
‘Camera Obscuras’, this means ‘Darkened rooms’ in Latin which was the language of the ancient Romans and many educated people in Europe and the Mediterranean region, were dark rooms in which the audience sat while the ‘magician’ entertained them by projecting outside images on to a light coloured wall, using concentrated sunlight directed through a tiny aperture although, there being a shortage of decent mirrors, the audience weren’t too happy if the images were shown ‘inverted’. It wasn’t until the 1500s that these shows were put on using a simple lens to improve picture quality and today’s camera became closer still.
The next step was when Isaac Newton, sadly not a descendant of Ga, discovered that white light is composed of different colours somewhere between the years 1664 and 1666 and then, in 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze found that silver nitrate darkens on exposure to light. In 1794, the very first ‘Panorama’, a with-it name for ‘Camera Obscura’ on a large scale and a proto-type movie house, was opened by Robert Barker it was still utilising Ga’s basic discovery.
The very first photographic image to be captured using ‘Camera Obscura’ was achieved by Joseph Niepce in 1814, but it faded away after a few hours. Then, in 1837, Louis Daguerre made the first fixed photographic image and both photographs and cameras were finally on their way.
By 1865 photographs, photographic negatives and cameras were evolving in leaps and bounds and became protected under copyright and Eastman patented the Kodak-roll film camera in 1888.The first camera to be mass produced was ‘The Brownie’ in 1900 and this made photography more accessible to ordinary people than it had been before and, by 1948, when Polaroid cameras were patented, ‘still’ photography was recognised as being here to stay. The launch of automatic camera in 1978 took some of the mystery out of photography and when consumer camcorders arrived on the scene in 1980, people could make their own movies too.
Things like digital electronic still cameras became available in 1984, Photo CD as a digital image storage medium in 1990, when Adobe Photoshop was also introduced for home editing on computers. By 1998, when the first consumer megapixel camera was launched, hi-tech cameras were the order of the day and it was only a matter of time until cameras were built in to mobile phones, which they were in 2000.
With Ga’s magical secrets available to everyone, his descendants currently have a hard time trying to make it as magicians but… they are working on something else absolutely incredible right now!