Johann Zahn was the seventeenth-century German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 author of Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (Würzburg

Würzburg

Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....

, 1685). This work contains many descriptions and diagrams, illustrations and sketches of both the camera obscura

Camera obscura

The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...

 and magic lantern

Magic lantern

The magic lantern or Laterna Magica is an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century.-Operation:The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture , and...

, along with various other lanterns, slides, projection

Slide projector

A slide projector is an opto-mechanical device to view photographic slides. Slide projectors were common in the 1950s to the 1970s as a form of entertainment; family members and friends would gather to view slide shows...

 types, peepshow boxes

Peep show

A peep show or peepshow is an exhibition of pictures, objects or people viewed through a small hole or magnifying glass. Though historically a peep show was a form of entertainment provided by wandering showmen, nowadays it more commonly refers a presentation of a sex show or pornographic film...

, microscopes, telescopes, reflectors, and lenses. As a student of light

Light

Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...

, Zahn is considered the most prolific writer and illustrator of the camera obscura.

Zahn was a canon

Canon (priest)

A canon is a priest or minister who is a member of certain bodies of the Christian clergy subject to an ecclesiastical rule ....

 of the Premonstrate Order in Würzburg under Cardinal Brandr Beekman-Ellner.

The first camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

 that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 (that is, actually capturing the image on some sort of medium) was created by Zahn in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before technology caught up to the point where this was possible to actually build (see History of the camera

History of the camera

The history of the camera can be traced back much further than the introduction of photography. Photographic cameras evolved from the camera obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic technology, including Daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film, and digital...

).

In Oculus Artificialis, Zahn's comprehensive description of the magic lantern (along with twelve other different lanterns) includes some of these lanterns showing for the first time lens

Lens (optics)

A lens is an optical device with perfect or approximate axial symmetry which transmits and refracts light, converging or diverging the beam. A simple lens consists of a single optical element...

 covers.