1

CHAPTER 1 – DEFINITIONS, HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND PRINCIPLES

A. Photography
1. Literal Definition: The word photograph is a derivation of two Greek words “phos” which means light
and “graphia” meaning write. Therefore photography best translates to “write with light.”
2. Modern Definition: It is an art or science which deals with the reproduction of images through the
action of light, upon sensitized materials, with the aid of a camera and its accessories, and the chemical
processes involved therein.

B. Police Photography
It is an art or science which deals the study of the principles of photography, the preparation of
photographic evidence, and its application to police work.

C. Forensic Photography
It is the art or science of documenting a crime scene and evidence for laboratory examination and
analysis for purposes of court.

Light – the days of creation - And God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. God saw the light
was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness
called “night”. And there was evening and there was morning. – The first day (Genesis chapter 1, verses
1-3)

Equipment- The portable camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber) was used by the artist or painters
to get accurate perspective of natural scene and scale of their subjects.

• Alhazen (or Ibn al-Haytham) is said to have actually invented the camera obscura, as well as
the pinhole camera which is based on the same idea. He carried out experiments with candles
and described how the image is formed by rays of light travelling in straight lines.

Chemicals- Light sensitivity of silver nitrate and silver chloride solution was discovered and
investigated.

• Silver halide- is a chemical compound and has been used in photographic film and paper for
hundreds of years. It is one of the compounds formed between silver and one of the halogens-
silver bromide (AgBr), silver chloride (AgCl), silver iodide (AgI)

TRUE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Daguerreotype and the Calotype were the first widely usable photographic processes to be
introduced to the world. The very makeup of the two methods would go on to create some of the
aesthetic building blocks of present photography, as well as influence an era to continue the active
invention of ever newer and more practical photographic methods, all while changing the very face of
art.

The Daguerreotype and the Calotype were the first to succeed in what we know today as
standard photographic process. These two seemingly similar yet wholly different processes came about
at roughly the same time in history by two entirely different individuals attempting to succeed in the
same outcome; to create a method by which light focused into image could be permanently affixed to a
media in a lasting and easily viewable manner.

DAGUERREOTYPE
2

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre- He made a public demonstration in Paris “Daguerreotype” in

collaboration with Joseph Nicephore Niepce. The “Daguerreotype” formed an image directly on the
silver surface on a metal plate. It is known as the first commercially successful photographic process.

CALOTYPE

William Henry Fox Talbot explained a process he had invented (calotype) at the Royal Society of
London. The “calotype” (beautiful picture) used paper with its surface fibers impregnated with light
sensitive compounds. This manner of photography was already a negative-positive process and had two
phases: first, creation of a paper negative and, second, its re-copying into a paper positive.

1839: Birth Year of Photography

IN THE YEAR 1839, two remarkable processes that would revolutionize our perceptions of
reality were announced separately in London and Paris; both represented responses to the challenge of
permanently capturing the fleeting images reflected into the camera obscura.

John William Draper took the first daguerreotype of the moon in 1839 or 1840 from a rooftop in
New York.

IMPORTANT DATES IN THE FIELD OF PHOTOGRAPHY

• 1848 – Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor introduced a process of negatives using egg white as
binding medium.
• 1850 – Louis Desirie Blanquart-Evard introduced a printing paper coated with albumen to
achieve a glossy surface.
• 1885 – During this time, the cameras were crude, the lenses could not form a true images, the
sensitive materials required long exposures and could not reproduced colors.
• It was 1856 when John Herschel coined the word “PHOTOGRAPHY.”
• 1861 – James Clark Maxwell researched on colors.
• 1890 – full corrected lenses were introduced.
• 1906 – A plate was placed on the market that could reproduce all colors.
• 1907 – Lumiere color was introduced, a panchromatic film was used with blue, green and red
filter. The Autochrome Lumière was an early color photography process patented in 1903 by
the Lumière brothers in France.
• 1914 – George Eastman, who founded the Eastman Kodak company which created
“Kodachrome”. Kodachrome is the brand name for a color reversal film introduced by Eastman
Kodak in 1935.
• 1947 – Edwin H. Land introduced “Polaroid” the one step photography.
• 1988 – The arrival of true digital cameras.

REKNOWN DIGITAL CAMERAS

• FUJI DS-1P -The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file which
recorded to a 16MB internal memory that used a bettery to keep the data in memory. The camera
was never marketed in the USA.
• KODAK DCS 100- The first commercially available digital camera. It used a 1.3 megapixel
sensor, had a bulky external digital storage system and was priced at 13,000 dollars.
• CASIO QV-10 -The world’s first consumer camera with a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) on the
back.
• KODAK DC 25- The first camera to use compact flash as a storage medium.

Criminal Applications of Photography

3

• 1854 – An Englishman, Maddox, developed a dry plate photography eclipsing Daguerre’s wet
plate. This made practical the photography of inmates for prison records.
• 1859 – In the United States, one of the earliest applied forensic science was in photography. It
was used to demonstrate evidence in a California case. Enlarged photographs of signature was
presented in a court case involving forgery.
• 1864 – Odelbercht first advocate the use of photography for the identification of criminals and
the documentation of evidence and crime scenes.Early photographs of accused and arrested
persons were beautifully posed as example of the Victorian photographers. Later, every major
police force in England and the United States has “Rogue’s gallery.”

ROGUE’S GALLERY- originated in the US in the mid-19th century as a term for the
collected images of known criminals.
• 1882 – Alphonse Bertillon who initiated anthropometric measurements for personal
identification was also involved in various means of documentation by photography which
developed into a fine science for Criminalistics when he photographed crime scenes.
Anthropometric measurements included weight, height, body mass index (BMI), body
circumference (arm, waist, hip and calf), waist to hip ratio (WHR), elbow amplitude and
knee-heel length.

The Will and William West case: The identical inmates that showed the need for fingerprinting,
1903

The man above was called Will

West, the man below William West,
and they were both sentenced to jail at
Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas
over a century years ago.

The arrival of Will West in 1903

caused the records clerk, M.W.
McClaughry, at the prison considerable
confusion, because he was convinced
he’d processed him two years
previously.

When he was asked, Will West

denied his previous imprisonment
there, but Mr. McClaughry ran the
Bertillon instruments over him anyway.
He knew the reluctance of criminals to admit past crimes. Sure enough, when Mr. McClaughry
referred to the formula derived from West’s Bertillon measurements, he located the file of one
William West, whose measurements were practically identical and whose photograph appeared to be
that of the new prisoner.

But Will West was not being coy about a previous visit to Leavenworth. Will insisted to
McClaughry that it was not him: “That’s my picture, but I don’t know where you got it, for I know I
have never been here before.”

When Mr. McClaughry turned

over William West’s record card he
found it was that of a man already in
4

the Penitentiary who had been admitted there two years previously, serving a life sentence for
murder.

Subsequently, the fingerprints of Will West and William West were impressed and compared. To
Mr. McClaughry’s surprise, the patterns bore no resemblance, both were totally different from each
other.

• 1902 – Dr. R.A. Reis, a German scientist trained in Chemistry and Physics at Lausanne
University in Switzerland. He contributed heavily to the use of photography in forensic science
and established the world’s earliest crime laboratory that serviced the academic community and
the Swiss police.His interests included photography of crime scenes, corpses, and evidence.

• 1910 – Victor Baltazar developed a method of photographic comparison of bullets and cartridge
cases which acts as an early foundation of the field of ballistics.

Criminology Education

• 1902 – Dr. R.A. Reis, professor at the University of Lausanne Switzerland set up one of the first
academic curricular in forensic science. His forensic Photography Department grew into
Lausanne Institute of Police Science.

• 1950 – August Vollmer, Chief of Police of Berkeley, California established the school of
criminology at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul Kirk presided over the major of
Criminalistics within the school.

• 1954 – In the Philippines, the school which pioneered criminology education is the Plaridel
Educational Institution now the Philippine College of Criminology.

Other Important Personalities in the Field of Photography

• Daniel Barbaro- He was an Italian who encouraged the use of the camera obscura for artistic
endeavors.
• Christiaan Huygens- He was a prominent Dutch mathematician and scientist. He is known
particularly as an astronomer, physicist, probabilist and horologist. He worked out on the wave
theory of light in 1678 and published it on his treatise on light in 1690. Wave theory speculates
that a light source emits light waves that spread in all directions.
• Johann Zahn- He was the 17th century German author of “Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus
Sive Telescopium”. His work contains many descriptions and diagrams, illustrations and
sketches of both the camera obscura and magic lantern, along with various other lanterns, slides,
projection types, peepshow boxes, microscopes, telescopes, reflectors and lenses.
• Isaac Newton- He was an English physicist and mathematician described in his own day as a
“natural philosopher” who is widely recognized as one of the most influential scientists of all
time and a key figure in the scientific revolution. He formulated the Theory of Color. He
demonstrated that clear white light was composed of seven visible colors.
• Desire Charles Emanuel Van Monckhoven- He was Belgian chemist and photographer who
became one of the foremost photographic scientists of the 19 th century. In 1878, he perfected the
preparation of silver bromide gelatin emulsion in the presence of ammonia. In 1879, he improved
the manufacture of dry plates and sold emulsion to dry plate factories.

• EMULSION- Photographic emulsions are light-sensitive coatings on film made up of grains

of micron-sized silver halide or bromide crystals suspended in a gelatin. When you expose
the photosensitive crystals to light, they undergo a chemical change that allows images to appear
on bases.
5

• Hermann Wilhelm Vogel- He was a German photo chemist and photographer, who discovered
dye sensitization, which is of great importance to photography.

• DYE SENSITIZATION- the producing of panchromatic or orthochromatic film by treating it

with an emulsion containing dyes that absorb light of all or certain colors.

• Louis Arthur Ducos Du Hauron- He was a French pioneer of color photography. He worked
on developing practical processes for color photography on the three color principle, using both
additive and subtractive methods.

• Dr. Rodolphe Archibald Reiss- He was a publicist, a chemist, a professor at the University of
Lausanne and a famous forensic scientist. He published two major forensic science books
“Photographie Judiciaire” (Forensic Photography) and “Manuel de police scientifique I Vols et
Homicides” (Handbook of Forensic Science I: Theft and Homicides)

• Oskar Barnack- He was a German optical engineer, precision mechanic, industrial engineer and
the “father of the 35 mm photography.”

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce- He was a French inventor, usually credited with the invention of
photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest
surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in
1825.

CHAPTER 2 - PHOTOGRAPHIC RAYS – ITS NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS

Light
-radiant electromagnetic energy
-186,000 miles per second in air.

The different energies in the electromagnetic spectrum are the following:

• Cosmic Rays
• Gamma Rays
• X-Rays (01-30 nn)
• Ultra Violet Rays (30-400 nn)
• Visible Light (400-700nn)
• Infrared Rays (700-1000+ nn)

Light rays with a wavelength of 400-700 nn is referred to as visible light because it is only within
these wavelengths that the human eye is capable of perceiving. Those with shorter or longer
wavelengths are commonly referred to as invisible radiations.

White Light
When all the wavelengths between 400-700nn are presented to the eye in nearly equal quantity,
we get the sensation or perception of colorless or white light. If a narrow beam of white light is allowed
to pass through a prism it will bend the light of shorter wavelengths more than those with longer
wavelengths thus spreading them out in visible spectrum. These are the colors of rainbow – the red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
It we divide the wavelength of visible light (400-700nn) equally into three (from 400nn to 500
nn, from 500 nn – 600 nn, from 600 nn – 700nn) we will produce blue, green and red colors. These are
known as the three primary colors of the light.

Production of Colors
6

• Absorption-The color of most ordinary object are due to the fact that they absorb the same
amount of light at each wavelength.
• Scattering-The color of the blue sky is due to the scattering of light by the atmosphere.
• Interference-Color can also be produced by interference of light waves in thin film like soap
bubles or a film of oil floating in water. The light reflected from the top surface of such film.
• Fluorescence-This happens when molecules of the fluorescent material absorb energy at one
wavelength and radiate it at another wavelength.
• Dispersion-Color may arise from differences in the refractive or bending power of a transparent
medium of light of different wavelength. The rainbow is a good example of this phenomenon.

Bending of Light
1. Reflection- It is a deflection or bouncing back of light when it hits a surface.
a. Regular Reflection- happens when light hits a flat, smooth and shiny object.
b. Irregular or diffused reflection- occurs when light hits a rough or uneven but glossy
object.
2. Refraction- It is the bending of light when passing from one medium to another.
3. Diffraction- the bending of light when it hits a sharp edge of an opaque object.

Kinds of object as to how they behave to light

1. Transparent Objects- Allows sufficient visible light to pass through them that the object on other
side may be clearly seen.

2. Translucent Objects- allows light to pass, however diffuse it sufficiently that objects on the other
side may not be clearly distinguished.

3. Opaque Objects- it is so greatly diffuse the light that recognizing the object on other side is very
difficult or impossible.

SOURCES OF LIGHT

• Natural Light- These is coming from nature like the sun, moon, stars, other heavenly bodies,
lightning, fire, etc.

1. Bright sunlight- a lighting condition where objects in open space cast a deep and uniform or
distinct shadow.

2. Hazy sunlight- Objects in open space cast a transparent shadow.

3. Dull sunlight- Objects in open space cast no shadow.

a. Cloudy bright– objects in open space cast no shadow but objects at far distance are
clearly visible.

b. Cloudy dull - objects in open space cast no shadow and visibility of distant objects
are already limited.

• Artificial Light- Light source of this category are man-made and is divided into the continuous
radiation and the short duration.

a. Continuous radiation are those that can give illumination continuously. Examples of these
common light source are the fluorescent lamp, incandescent lamp, gas lamp, etc.
7

b. Short duration (flash unit) a flash unit gives a brief flash through a very popular electronic
flash. Through these flash unit , it allows the photographer to control the direction, quality, and intensity
of light to achieve the desired result.

Forensic Light Source

1. Ultra Violet Lamp- The UV photography also used on the things that is hidden or obscured while the
infrared photography can be used in total darkness.

2. LASER – Light Amplification through Simulated Emission of Radiation- This was especially
significant in locating dried biological stains such as semen, urine and saliva, as well as stains that has
been washed. It is quite expensive. It is also known as coherent light.

3. Alternative Light Source- The ALS was developed in mid 80’s as a far more inexpensive alternative
to forensic LASER. The ALS is matched to the LASER frequency available at crime scene.

4. Forensic Light Source- This kind of light source of FLS will enable a criminalist to search latent
fingerprints of rough surfaces.

CAMERA

Camera- It is a light tight box, with a lens to form an image with a shutter and diaphragm to control the
entry of the images a means of holding a film to record the image and a viewer or viewfinder to show

the photographer what the image is.

CLASSIFICATION OF CAMERA

 Overall design and functions

8

a. System camera- Its rigid body design accepts wide variety of lenses, viewers, film backs, and
accessories and can be attached or integrated to adapt to scientific, technical, architectural, astronomical,
underwater and many other kinds of photography.

b. Digital cameras- This type of camera digitalize the image which can be put into a computer
and enhanced through a software package such as Adobe Photoshop.

Types of Camera

• Viewfinder Camera- the image in the viewfinder is completely separate from the image
acquired through the lens. The viewfinder usually has its own simple lens which shows an
approximation of the image that will be captured.
• Single Lens Reflex Camera (SLR) Camera- is a camera that typically uses a mirror and prism
system that permits the photographer to view through the lens and see exactly what will be
captured.
• Twin Lens Reflex Camera- are "two-eyed" cameras and has a separate viewing and taking
lens, one over the other.
• View Camera- A view camera is a style of camera that dates back to the 1850’s and most
commonly shoots to 4″x5″ film slides. A view camera has a very distinctive 2-part design that is
joined in the middle by a flexible bellows. The front section of the camera holds a lens mount
and a mechanical shutter, while the rear section of the camera holds a piece of “ground glass”.

Lens- a lens is a transparent medium which either converge or diverge light rays passes through it to
form an image.

Types of Lenses

1. Convex Lens- it is the convergent or the positive lens.

2. Concave Lens- it is the divergent or the negative lens.

Inherent Defects of Lenses or Aberrations

1. Spherical Aberrations- When light passing through near the central part of a converging lens are
bended more sharply than those rays falling in the edge, thus the rays coming from the edges are focused
on a plane nearer the lens than those coming from the central part.

2. Coma- This is another form of spherical aberration but is concerned with the light rays entering the
lens obliquely. The defect is noticeable only on the outer edges and not on the central part of lens. It the
lens has a coma, circular objects reproduced at the corners of the negative are comet – like form.

3. Curvature of field- This is a kind of defect where the image formed by a lens comes to a sharper focus
in the curved surface than a flat surface.

4. Distortion is incapable of rendering straight lines correctly; either horizontal or vertical lines on an
object. This is caused by the placement of the diaphragm. If the diaphragm is placed in front of the lens
straight lines near the edges of the objects tends to bulged outside. This is known as barrel distortion. If
the diaphragm is placed behind of the lens, straight lines near the edges tends to bend inward. This is
known as pincushion distortion.

5. Chromatic Aberration- This defect is the inability of the lens to bring photographic rays of different
wave lengths to the same focus.

6. Astigmatism- occurs when the lens fails to focus image lines running in different directions in the
same plane. It is caused by the irregular shape of your camera.
9