PAINTING CAMERAS THE NEWSEST ART FORM IN PHOTOGRAPHY By J a n n i c k P . R o l l a n d and S t e v e L . Hylen Optical adaptations o f c a m e r a l e n s e s a n d t e c h n i q u e s have c h a n g e d a n d will continue to change the opportunities for photographic artists to manipulate images more creatively. Before the invention of photography by Louis Dagucrre in 1839, people used simple sketches, drawings, or paintings to capture important images. Such images included moments in time, facial expressions, still lifes, the dynamics of people interacting, and both the beauty and harshness of nature. The process of photography that Daguerre invented created amazingly sharp pictures that Were made in a portable camera obscura, the simplest camera form that artists had used for centuries as a sketching-aid, modi- fied to capture the picture on a light-sensitive plate. The combination of poor lenses, operating at slow f/num- bers, such as f/17, and slow-acting chemicals, required exposures of up to 20 min in bright sunlight for an image to be recorded. 1 Optics & Photonics News/July 1999 33