Photographic film how does it work

Some color films have even more layers. Around middle of 19th century, glass plates became standard because early transparent plastics could not achieve opaqueness of glass and was still much more expensive than glass.

The first roll film on transparent plastic on nitrocellulose which is highly flammable was invented in It was made of cellulose acetate and was invented as a replacement for dangerous nitrate film. First Photographic plates that could produce images in color appeared in but they required complex equipment, long exposure times and were not too practical.

Color films appeared in s but these early films produced images that were too dark. In Kodak started selling Kodachrome which was much more similar to the modern color film because it used subtractive color method. This color film was used for home movies and for photographic cameras but was still too dark and much more expensive than black and white films.

It needed some 40 years for color film to become standard and for black and white to be used for low-light photography and for art photography. I'm a nostalgic person. I love looking at photos of my parents before their gray years and their wrinkles, before they had me.

I like searching for snapshots of old memories that my brain hasn't held onto. In the boxes, the photos are stored in small packets, their plastic negatives at the bottom. These days, my first instinct when I want to snap a photo is to grab my phone, so old negatives are a relic of another time.

But that time was not even 15 years ago. Today, film photography is rare. But holding all those physical photos in my hands and running my finger along the edges of the negatives, I get curious. How does photographic film actually work? Producing film requires meticulous math and specific chemistry applied on a massive scale. While many photographers could easily pick up and shoot a roll of film, understanding how it actually works is another story.

This minute video from YouTube channel Smarter Every Day does an excellent job diving into the chemical mechanisms that go into capturing photos. Film, as we know it, relies on light-sensitive silver suspended in an emulsion made with gelatin. Light hits that silver to create a latent image, which emerges when it crystallized during the development process.

The silver stays in the negative when you shoot black-and-white film, which has always seemed very cool to me. But, each black-and-white negative is, in a way, a very tiny silver sculpture of the scene you saw in front of you.

Color developers use bleach to wash the silver off of the film and the color itself comes from dyes instead.