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In 2002, a electronics company Nokia made a device called the Nokia7650. It had a build in camera. It was really popular.

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of a device that has completely changed the mobile phone industry and determined the direction of further smartphone development.

Back in 2002, Nokia, then the world's largest manufacturer, launched a model called the Nokia 7650, the first one with a built-in camera. I know, could be nitpicking with some marginal manufacturers such as Kyocera or Sharp, who, truth be told, were really the first to launch phones with a built-in camera, but everyone knows that these were experiments that never come to life, nor has anyone ever taken them seriously.

Nokia was at the peak of its power at the time, so it was the first to launch a camera device that would go into mass production and be available worldwide.

The first such commercial model was the mentioned Nokia 7650, which brought a VGA camera on the back, a screen that supported 4096 colors, but also a rather unconventional overall design for the time. The 7650 was a slider cell phone. The numeric keypad could be opened and closed with a simple mechanism.

Apart from the eye-catchy design, it brought support for the WAV audio format, so you could install your own ringtone as a song or put some interesting sound for an incoming text message.

Personally, I was one of the first owners of this device in the world. When I say this, I am not exaggerating, because, in 2002, the penetration of mobile telephony in the population was incomparably lower than today. Back then, the Nokia 3310 and Ericsson T10 were the most commonly seen models seen on the streets, in offices, and on cafe tables, while managers, and those who felt that way, were in possession of the Ericsson T68 or some other expensive phone.

The Nokia 7650 was eye-catching, both because of its unusual shape and rather a large color screen at the time. This 2.1-inch screen was visibly larger than the one on the Ericsson T68, and due to the 4096 supported colors, it also brought incomparably better display. So good that the photos on it looked real and the background images were stunning.

The camera had a VGA resolution senzor, which means that the photos taken with it were 640 x 480 pixels big. From today's perspective, this seems rather backward, but at the time, it was pushing the boundaries. Since there were no social networks yet, the photos taken with this camera could normally be used on websites and forums, and the participants in the discussions would not have imagined that the photos were taken with a mobile phone. Truth be told, back then, digital cameras weren't much better either, at least not for the purpose of using photos online.

Unfortunately, this camera was not able to record video, but this was soon made possible by the hard work of developers who began developing applications for this device. In addition to being marked as the first commercial camera phone, the Nokia 7650 was also the founder of Symbian, an operating system that soon developed into a great ecosystem. There were no app stores like today, but various web services had specialized in selling mobile software on their sites.

Symbian may not have been the first mobile phone operating system to allow installing applications, but it was far more popular than any other that existed, such as Microsoft's PocketPC, PalmOS, or BlackBerry.

Symbian as such succeeded and for many years represented a paradigm in the world of smartphones, until the advent of the iPhone and then Android. This era was also marked by its many excellent successors, such as the 6600, 7680 and the mega-popular N-series.

Anyway, the Nokia 7650 certainly deserves a place in the history of technology, engraved in golden letters, and we will remember it as the originator of cameras on mobile phones, without which we could not imagine today's world.

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Flashback: 20 years ago, Nokia 7650, the first camera phone was launched | Nokiamob

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of a device that has completely changed the mobile phone industry and determined the direction of further smartphone development. Back in 2002, Nokia, then the world's largest manufacturer, launched a model called the Nokia 7650, the first one with a built-in camera.

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First colour photography - Saomai Nguyen

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First colour photography - Saomai Nguyen

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The first time colour photography was a thing was in the 1890’s. It was based on a scientific colour theory about mixing red, green, and blue light which are primary colours of light. That theory was discovered in 1860’s by James clerk Maxwell. A number of people were credited for discovering colour photography including Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Sutton, Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor, and Louis and Auguste Lumière.
The Lumière brothers were the first to put a colour photographing process on the market in 1907. Abel discovered an improved heliographic technique that allowed photographs to be translated into a printing plate. These are just some facts but there is so much more to the world of colour photography and how it was founded and how it is today.

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Modern Vivex colour print made from negatives of Clerk Maxwell | Science Museum Group Collection

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Modern "Vivex" colour print (c. 1930s) made from what is believed to be the first set of tri-colour separation negatives made, i.e. those of James Clerk Maxwell of 1861.

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The first digital cameras that were made for the general public came out on February 17, 1994. This worked with a home computer via a serial cable, the name was the Apple QuickTake 100 camera. there were a couple of other ones such as the Kodak DC40 camera (March 28, 1995), the Casio QV-11 with LCD monitor (late 1995), and Sony's Cyber-Shot Digital Still Camera (1996). Kinko's and Microsft both collaborated with Kodak to create digital images for documents.

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The history of the digital camera dates back to the early 1950s. Digital camera technology is directly related to and evolved from the same technology that recorded television images.

Digital Photography and the VTR

In 1951, the first videotape recorder (VTR) captured live images from television cameras by converting the information into electrical impulses (digital) and saving the information onto magnetic tape. Bing Crosby Laboratories (the research team funded by Crosby and headed by engineer John Mullin) created the first early VTR. By 1956, VTR technology was perfected (the VR1000 invented by Charles P. Ginsburg and the Ampex Corporation) and in common use by the television industry. Both television/video cameras and digital cameras use a CCD (Charged Coupled Device) to sense light color and intensity.

Digital Photography and Science

During the 1960s, NASA converted from using analog to digital signals with their space probes to map the surface of the moon and send digital images back to Earth. Computer technology was also advancing at this time and NASA used computers to enhance the images the space probes were sending.

Digital imaging also had another government use at the time: spy satellites. Government use of digital technology helped advance the science of digital imaging. However, the private sector also made significant contributions. Texas Instruments patented a filmless electronic camera in 1972, the first to do so. In August 1981, Sony released the Sony Mavica electronic still camera, the first commercial electronic camera. Images were recorded onto a mini disc and then put into a video reader that was connected to a television monitor or color printer. However, the early Mavica cannot be considered a true digital camera even though it started the digital camera revolution. It was a video camera that took video freeze-frames.

Since the mid-1970s, Kodak has invented several solid-state image sensors that "converted light to digital pictures" for professional and home consumer use. In 1986, Kodak scientists invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5 x 7-inch digital photo-quality print. In 1987, Kodak released seven products for recording, storing, manipulating, transmitting, and printing electronic still video images. In 1990, Kodak developed the photo CD system and proposed "the first worldwide standard for defining color in the digital environment of computers and computer peripherals." In 1991, Kodak released the first professional digital camera system (DCS), which was aimed at photojournalists. It was a Nikon F-3 camera equipped by Kodak with a 1.3-megapixel sensor.

Digital Cameras for Consumers

The first digital cameras for the consumer-level market that worked with a home computer via a serial cable were the Apple QuickTake 100 camera (February 17, 1994), the Kodak DC40 camera (March 28, 1995), the Casio QV-11 with LCD monitor (late 1995), and Sony's Cyber-Shot Digital Still Camera (1996).

However, Kodak entered an aggressive co-marketing campaign to promote the DC40 and to help introduce the idea of digital photography to the public. Kinko's and Microsoft both collaborated with Kodak to create digital image-making software workstations and kiosks, which allowed customers to produce photo CDs and ​photographs and add digital images to documents. IBM collaborated with Kodak in making an internet-based network image exchange. Hewlett-Packard was the first company to make color inkjet printers that complemented the new digital camera images.

The marketing worked. Today, digital cameras are everywhere.

Shelp, Scott G. "A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide to Photography." Second Edition, Selective Focus Press, 2006, San Francisco, CA.

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What Is the History of the Digital Camera?

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The history of the digital camera dates back to the early 1950s. Digital camera technology is directly related to and evolved from the same technology that recorded television images. In 1951, the first videotape recorder (VTR) captured live images from television cameras by converting the information into electrical impulses (digital) and saving the information onto magnetic tape.

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When photos came out for the very first time people were amazed however they were disappointed. Many were disappointed with how delicately it could take a photo but somehow was not able to show it in colour. At one point the clients were so eager that the photographer started to paint the pictures by hand. It was not until the 1890s the first color photography appeared.

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Learn about the development of colour photography-from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

Today we take colour photography for granted. Taking pictures in full, natural colour is so easy that we don't pause to consider how it all came about. Yet the search for a cheap and simple process of colour photography was a long and difficult quest.

This story explores the different approaches early inventors and entrepreneurs took in the race to develop a successful colour photographic process, from hand-colouring and the Lumière brothers' autochrome to the first commercially successful 'integral tripack' system, Kodachrome.

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the development of colour photography-from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the invention of colour photographic processes and the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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The first camera to be invented was by a French inventor in 1816. The first iteration of film that he had created was made out of paper coated with silver chloride. This would produce a negative image. This is where it is darker and where it is supposed to be lighter.

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The history of cameras is not defined by slow-moving evolution. Rather, it was a series of world-changing discoveries and inventions followed by the rest of the world catching up. The first camera to take a permanent photograph was invented a hundred years before the portable camera was available to the middle class. A hundred years after that, the camera has become a part of daily life.

Today's camera is a small, digital addition to the incredible computer that is our smartphone. For the professional, it may be the digital SLR, capable of taking high-definition video or thousands of high-resolution photos. For the nostalgic, it might be a take on the instant cameras of yesteryear. Each of these represent a single leap forward in camera technology.

The first camera was invented in 1816 by French inventor Nicephore Niepce. His simple camera used paper coated with silver chloride, which would produce a negative of the image (dark where it should be light). Because of how silver chloride works, these images were not permanent. However, later experiments using "Bitumen of Judea" produced permanent photos, some of which remain today.

French inventor Nicephore Niepce may have created the first photograph in 1816, but his experiments with camera obscura, an ancient technique for capturing an image using a small hole in the wall of a dark room or box, had been occurring for years. Niepce had left his post as Administrator of Nice in 1795 in order to return to his family's estate and begin scientific research with his brother, Claude.

Nicephore was particularly fascinated with the concept of light and was a fan of early lithographs using the "Camera Obscura" technique. Having read the works of Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Johann Heinrich Schulze, he knew that silver salts would darken when exposed to light and would even change properties. However, like these men before him, he never found a way to make these changes permanent.

Nicephore Niepce experimented with a range of other substances before turning towards a "film" made from "Bitumen of Judea." This "bitumen," sometimes also known as "Asphalt of Syria," is a semi-solid form of oil that appears like tar. Mixed with pewter, it was found to be the perfect material for Niepce to employ. Using the wooden camera obscura box he had, he could create a permanent image on this surface, though it was quite blurred. Niepce referred to this process as "heliography".

Excited about further experiments, Niepce began corresponding with his good friend and colleague Louis Daguerre more often. He continued to experiment with other compounds and was confident that somehow the answer lied in silver.

Unfortunately, Nicephore Niepce passed away in 1833. However, his legacy remained as Daguerre continued the work that the french genius had started, eventually producing the first mass-produced device.

Camera Obscura is a technique used to create an image by using a small hole in a wall or piece of material. The light entering this hole can project an image of the world outside it onto the opposite wall.

If a person sits in a dark room, camera obscura could allow a hole the size of a pin to project an image of the garden outside on their wall. If you made a box with a hole on one side and thin paper on the other, it could capture the image of the world on that paper.

The camera obscura concept has been known for millennia, with even Aristotle having used a pinhole camera to observe solar eclipses. During the 18th century, the technique led to the creation of portable "camera boxes" that the bored and wealthy would use to practice drawing and painting with. Some art historians argued that even beloved masters like Vermeer took advantage of "cameras" when creating some of their works.

It was such a "camera" that Niepce experimented with when using silver chloride, and the devices would become the basis for his partner's next great invention.

Louis Daguerre, the scientific partner of Niepce, continued working after the latter genius' passing. Daguerre was an apprentice of architecture and theater design and obsessed with finding a way to create a simple device to create permanent images. Continuing to experiment with silver, he eventually came across a relatively simple method that worked.

What is a Daguerreotype?

A Daguerreotype is an early form of photo camera, designed by Louis Daguerre in 1839. A plate with a thin film of silver iodide was exposed to light for minutes or hours. Then, in darkness, the photographer would treat it with mercury vapor and heated saltwater. This would remove any silver iodide that the light had not changed, leaving behind a fixed camera image.

Though technically a mirror image of the world it captured, Daguerreotypes produced positive images, unlike the "negatives" of Niepce. While the first daguerreotypes required long exposure times, technological advances decreased this period within a few years so that the camera could even be used to create family portraits.

The daguerreotype was extremely popular, and the French government purchased the rights to the design in exchange for a life pension for Louis and his son. France then presented the technology, and the science behind it, as a gift "free to the world". This only increased the interest in the technology, and soon every wealthy household would take advantage of this new device.

What is a Calotype?

An old Calotype camera from the mid 19th century (Image Source)

A Calotype is an early form of photo camera developed by Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s and presented to the Royal Institute in 1839. Talbot's design used writing paper soaked in table salt and then brushed lightly with silver nitrate (which was called a "film"). Capturing images due to chemical reactions, the paper could then be "waxed" to save the image.

Calotype images were negatives, like Niecpe's original photographs, and produced more blurred pictures than the daguerreotype. However, Talbot's invention required less exposure time.

Patent disputes and blurrier images meant that the Calotype was never as successful as its French counterpart. However, Talbot remained an important figure in the history of cameras. He continued experimenting with chemical processes and eventually developed the early techniques required to create multiple prints from a single negative (as well as progressing our understanding of the physics of light itself).

The first mass marketed camera was a daguerreotype camera produced by Alphonse Giroux in 1839. It cost 400 francs (approximately $7,000 by today's standards). This consumer camera had an exposure time of 5 to 30 minutes, and you could purchase standardized plates in a range of sizes.

The daguerreotype would be replaced in 1850 by a new "colloid process", which required treating the plates before using them. This process produced sharper images and would require a shorter exposure time. So fast was the exposure time required that they needed the invention of a "shutter" that could quickly expose the plate to light before blocking it again.

However, the next significant advancement in camera technology came in the creation of "film."

American entrepreneur George Eastman created the first camera that used a single roll of paper (and then celluloid) film, called "The Kodak" in 1888.

The Kodak camera could capture negative pictures much like the Calotype. These pictures, however, were sharp like daguerreotypes, and you could measure exposure time in fractions of a second. The film would need to remain in the dark box camera, which would be sent in its entirety back to Eastman's company for the images to be processed. The first Kodak camera had a roll that could hold 100 pictures.

The Kodak Camera

The Kodak cost only $25 and came with the catchy slogan, "You press the button... we do the rest." The Eastman Kodak Company became one of the largest companies in America, with Eastman himself becoming one of the richest men. In 1900, the company created the most simplistic, high-quality camera available to the middle class - The Kodak Brownie. This American box camera was relatively inexpensive. Being so accessible to the middle class helped popularize the use of photography as a way to commemorate birthdays, vacations, and family gatherings. As development costs decreased, people could take photos for any reason, or no reason at all.

By the time of his death, his philanthropy was only rivaled by Rockefeller and Carnegie. His donations included $22 Million to MIT to continue investigating new technology. His company, Kodak, continued to dominate the camera market until the rise of digital camera technology in the 1990s.

Thanks to the popularity of Kodak products and the introduction of other portable cameras, film cameras made using image plate processes obsolete.

35mm, or 135 Film was introduced by the Kodak camera company in 1934 and quickly became the standard. This film was 35mm wide, with each "frame" having a height of 24mm for a 1:1.5 ratio. This allowed for the same "cassette" or "roll" of film to be used in the cameras of a different brand and quickly became the norm.

35mm film would come in a cassette shielding it from light. The photographer would place it into the camera and would "wind" it onto a spool within the device. The film was wound back into the cassette as each photograph was taken. When they opened the camera once more, the film would be back safely in the cassette, ready for processing.

A standard cassette of 135 film would have 36 exposures (or photos) available, while later films contained 20 or 12.

The 35mm film was popularized with the production of the famous Leica camera, but other cameras soon followed suit. 35mm is now the most commonly used film in analog photography. Disposable cameras use 135 film encased within the cheap camera rather than within a cassette that could be replaced. While it may be challenging to find a nearby processor, many photographers still use 135 film.

The Leica (a portmanteau of "Leitz Camera") was first designed in 1913. Its thin and lightweight design quickly gained popularity, and the addition of collapsible and detachable lenses turned it into the handheld camera all other manufacturers attempted to copy.

When Ernst Leitz took over the directorship of the Optical Institute in 1869, the German engineer was only 27. The institute made its money selling lenses, primarily in the form of microscopes and telescopes.

However, Leitz had been trained in watchmaking and other small engineering projects. He was a leader who believed success came from designing the next technology and encouraged his employees to experiment more often. In 1879, the company changed names to reflect its new director. The company moved to binoculars and more complex microscopes soon after.

In 1911, Leitz hired a young Oskar Barnack, who was obsessed with creating the perfect portable camera. Encouraged by his mentor, he was given significant funding and resources to do so. The result, which arrived in 1930, was The Leica One. It had a screw-thread attachment to change lenses, of which the company offered three. It sold three thousand units.

The Leica II arrived only a couple of years later, with the company adding a range finder and separate viewfinder. The Leica III, produced in 1932, included a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second and was so popular they were still being made in the mid-fifties.

The Leica set a new standard, and the influence of its design can be seen in the cameras of today. While Kodak's cameras may have been the most popular of the day, Leica's changed the industry permanently. Kodak themselves replied with the Retina I, while a fledgling camera company in Japan, Canon, produced its first 35mm in 1936.

The first movie camera was invented in 1882 by Étienne-Jules Marey, a French inventor. Called the "chronophotographic gun," it took 12 images a second and exposed them on a single curved plate.

At the most superficial level, a movie camera is a regular photographic camera that can take repeated images at a high rate. When used in movies, these images are referred to as "frames." The most famous early movie camera was the " Kinetograph," a device created by engineer William Dickson in Thomas Edison's laboratories, the same place where the first lightbulb was invented. It was powered by an electric motor, used celluloid film, and ran at 20 to 40 frames per second.

This 1891 invention signaled the beginning of cinematography, and early sheets of film from the camera are still in existence. Modern movie cameras are digital and can record tens of thousands of frames a second.

Thomas Sutton developed the first camera to use single-lens reflex (SLR) technology in 1861. It employed the technology used before in camera obscura devices - reflex mirrors would allow a user to look through the camera's lens and see the exact image recorded on film.

Other cameras at the time used "Twin-lens reflex cameras," in which the user would see through a separate lens and see a slightly different image than what was recorded on the plate or film.

While single-lens reflex cameras were the superior choice, the technology behind them was complex for nineteenth-century camera manufacturers. When companies such as Kodak and Leica produced their own economically viable mass marketed cameras, they also avoided single-lens reflex cameras because of the costs. Even today, disposable cameras rely on the twin-lens camera instead.

However, the single-lens reflex camera was essential for those with money who were serious about developing their passion for technology. The first 35mm SLR was the "Filmanka," which came out of the Soviet Union in 1931. However, this had only a short production run and used a waist-level viewfinder.

The first mass-marketed SLR that properly utilized the design we know today was the Italian "Rectaflex," which had a run of 1000 cameras before production was halted due to World War II.,

The SLR camera soon became the camera of choice for hobbyists and professional photographers. New technology allowed the reflexive mirror to "flip up" when the shutter opened, meaning the image through the viewfinder was perfectly like that captured on film. As Japanese camera companies started to produce high-quality devices, they focussed entirely on SLR systems. Pentax, Minolta, Canon, and Nikon are now considered the most competitive camera companies globally, almost wholly due to their perfection of the SLR. Newer models included light meters and range-finders within the viewfinder, as well as easily-adjustable settings for shutter speed and aperture sizes.

Before 1978, a camera lens would need to be manipulated so that the clearest picture would reach the plate or film. The photographer would do this by making slight movements to change the distance between the lens and the film, usually by turning the lens mechanism.

The first cameras had a fixed focus lens that could not be manipulated, which meant that the camera needed to be at an exact distance from the subjects, and all subjects had to be at that same distance. Within years of the first daguerreotype camera, inventors realized they could create a lens that could be moved to suit the distance between device and subject. They would use primitive rangefinders to determine how the lens needed to be changed for the clearest photo.

During the eighties, camera manufacturers were able to use additional mirrors and electronic sensors to determine the ultimate placement of the lens and small motors to manipulate them automatically. This auto-focus capability was first seen in the Polaroid SX-70, but by the mid-eighties was standard in most high-end SLRs. Auto-focus was an optional feature so that professional photographers could choose their own setting if they wanted the image to be clearer away from the center of the photograph.

The first color photograph was created in 1961 by Thomas Sutton (the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera). He made the photograph by using three separate monochrome plates. Sutton created this photo specifically to use in the lectures of James Maxwell, the man who discovered that we could make any visible color as a combination of Red, Green, and Blue.

The first photographic camera presented its images in monochrome, showing black and white images in final form. Sometimes, the single color might be blue, silver, or gray - but it would only be one color.

From the beginning, inventors wanted to find a way to produce images in the colors we see as humans . While some found success in using multiple plays, others tried to find a new chemical with which they could coat the photographic plate. A relatively successful method used color filters between the lens and plate.

Eventually, through much experimentation, inventors were able to develop a film that could capture colorBy 1935, Kodak was able to produce "Kodachrome" film. It contained three different emulsions layered on the same film, each "recording" its own color. The creation of the film, as well as the processing of it, was an expensive task and so was out of reach for the middle-class users that were beginning to take up photography as a hobby.

It was not until the middle of the 1960s that color film became as financially accessible as black-and-white. Today, some analog photographers still prefer black and white, insisting that the film produces a clearer picture. Modern digital cameras use the same three-color system to record color, but the results depend more on recording the data.

The instant camera can produce the photograph within the device, rather than requiring the film to be developed later. Edwin Land invented it in 1948, and his Polaroid Corporation cornered the market for the next fifty years. Polaroid was so famous that the camera has undergone "genericization". Photographers today may not even know that Polaroid is a brand, not the instant camera itself.

The instant camera worked by having the film negative taped to the positive with a film of processing material. Initially, the user would peel the two pieces, with the negative discarded. Later versions of the camera would peel away the negative from within and eject only the positive. The most popular photographic film used for instant cameras was approximately three inches square, with a distinctive white border.

Polaroid cameras were quite popular during the seventies and eighties but suffered near obsolescence due to the rise of the digital camera. Recently, Polaroid has seen a resurgence in popularity on a wave of "retro" nostalgia.

While digital photography was theorized as early as 1961, it wasn't until Kodak engineer Steven Sasson put his mind to it that engineers created a working prototype. His 1975 creation weighed four kilograms and captured black and white images onto a cassette tape. This digital camera also required a unique screen to be looked at and could not print the pictures.

Sasson made this first digital camera possible thanks to the " charged-coupled device " (CCD). This device used electrodes that would change voltage when exposed to light. The CCD was developed in 1969 by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who later earned the Nobel Prize in physics for their invention.

Sasson's device had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (100 x 100) and took 23 seconds of exposure to record an image. Today's smartphones are over ten thousand times clearer and can take pictures in the smallest fractions of a second.

The first commercially available handheld camera which used digital photography was the 1990 Dycam Model 1. Created by Logitech, it used a similar CCD to Sasson's original design but recorded the data onto the internal memory (which came in the form of 1 megabyte of RAM). The camera could then be connected to your personal computer and the image could be "downloaded" onto it for viewing or printing.

Digital manipulation software arrived on personal computers in 1990, which increased the popularity of digital cameras. Now images could be processed and manipulated at home without the need for costly materials or a dark room.

Digital single-lens Reflex Cameras (DSLRs) became the next big thing, and Japanese camera companies were especially excited. Nikon and Canon soon cornered the market with their high-quality devices that included digital viewfinders that could look at previous pictures. By 2010, Canon controlled 44.5% of the DSLR market, followed by Nikon with 29.8% and Sony with 11.9%.

The first camera phone was the Kyocera VP-210. Developed in 1999, it included a 110,000-pixel camera and a 2-inch color screen to view the photos. It was quickly followed up by digital cameras from Sharp and Samsung.

When Apple released their first iPhone, camera phones became a helpful tool rather than a fun gimmick. The iPhone could send and receive images via a cellular network and used new complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) chips. These chips replaced CCDs by being less energy-intensive and offering a more specific data recording.

It would be hard to imagine a mobile phone that did not include a digital camera today. The iPhone 13 has multiple lenses and works as a video camera with 12 megapixels of resolution. That is 12,000 times the resolution of the original device created in 1975.

While most of us today have digital cameras in our pockets, high-quality SLRs still have a role to play. From professional wedding photographers to cinematographers looking for lightweight film cameras, devices like the Canon 5D are a necessary tool. In a wave of nostalgia, hobbyists are returning to 35mm film, claiming it "has more soul" than its digital counterparts.

The history of the camera is long, with many great leaps forward followed by years of perfecting the technology. From the first camera to the modern smartphone, we have come a long way in searching for the perfect picture.

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The First Camera Ever Made: A History of Cameras

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The history of cameras is not defined by slow-moving evolution. Rather, it was a series of world-changing discoveries and inventions followed by the rest of the world catching up. The first camera to take a permanent photograph was invented a hundred years before the portable camera was available to the middle class.

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Modern day photography is a time when photographers explored taking pictures away from what was traditional. Modern photography started in the 20th century. By 1920 they started exploring new ideas like abstraction.

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In Photography, Art Blog, David Kracov, SN

It's easy to confuse modern art and contemporary art, so it's common to ask what modern photography refers to. Modern photography refers to a specific period during which the photography artists moved away from traditional styles.

These classic styles of pictorialist photography were a more direct way of capturing photos. Traditional pictorial techniques stuck closely to nature in a documentary fashion, or they tried to mimic painterly styles of artwork. However, modern photographers used the camera as a tool to capture and create images.

Modern Photography Styles

Modern photography styles started in the 20th century during a significant change across the world, industry, society, and of course, art. By the 1920s, photographers had begun to use the medium for social, political commentary, as well as aesthetics.

Photographers experimented with light, perspective, and new methods of developing photographs. Like painters, they also explored new subjects and abstraction. The works produced during the first part of the 20th century became known as 'modernist photography.'

Modern Photography Styles

Surrealism

Dadaism

Abstract Photography

Constructivism

Bauhaus

Fashion photography

Pictorialism

Dusseldorf School

X-ray photography

Straight photography

Photo-Secessionist

What Is Photography?

Photography is defined as the process of capturing light with a camera and capturing an image. Nowadays, that camera could come in various forms, including cell phone cameras, digital cameras, and traditional analog cameras.

However, modern photographs were predominantly captured using analog cameras. Some digital photography was introduced near the end of the modernist period.
Learn more about photography.
Is Photography Under Modern Art?

Photography is still a relatively new form of art that is only around 150 years old. Photography is much more recent than other art forms such as painting or sculpture. Because of its relative newness, much of the body of photography art in existence was created during the modernist art period.

Photography was a significant part of the modern and contemporary art movements that took place during the first half of the 20th century. The invention of photography also dramatically changed the purpose and course of other artistic styles.

When Did Modern Photography Begin?

Photography was first created in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, but his first photograph was an experiment, not a work of art. The modern photography period has roughly the same timespan as other modern art periods.

Modern photography started around the turn of the 20th century in the 1900s and lasted until the late 1960s. The influence of modern photography from this period remains to this day.

Contemporary photography, often confused with modern photography, refers to the work of living working artists, usually created from the 1960s onwards.

Who Is Known as the Father of Modern Photography?

Alfred Stieglitz is often cited as the "father of modern photography." Stieglitz was undoubtedly one of the pioneers of modern photography. In a time when many of the arts were stuck in their traditions, he dared to break out from the mold. Stieglitz took photographic art into a brand new era of expression.

Stieglitz is also credited as the founder of both the Photo-Secessionist and Pictorialist photography movements. As a groundbreaking artist, he is recognized as the forerunner of the modern photography era.

Famous Modern Photographers

Many of the best-known photographers created artwork during the modernist era. Some of these famous modern photographers include:

Alfred Stieglitz

Richard Avedon

Joan Miró

Man Ray

Pablo Piccaso

Imogen Cunningham

Diane Arbus

Dorothea Lang

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Andreas Gursky

Edward Weston

Rene Magritte

August Sander

David Hockney

Gordon Parks

Enjoying Modern Photography

Many collectors enjoy modern photography and like collecting and buying photography art. You can purchase original or one-of-a-kind modern and contemporary photography in an art gallery online or find limited editions recreations of famous modern photography.

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What is Modern Photography Styles? - Eden Gallery

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In Photography, Art Blog, David Kracov, SN It's easy to confuse modern art and contemporary art, so it's common to ask what modern photography refers to. Modern photography refers to a specific period during which the photography artists moved away from traditional styles. These classic styles of pictorialist photography were a more direct way of capturing photos.

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The first digital camera was invented by an engineer named Steven Sasson in 1975. He built a prototype that was built from a movie camera lens and contained 16 batteries to run.

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History of digital cameras: From ’70s prototypes to iPhone and Galaxy’s everyday wonders

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The inventor of the polaroid camera corporation is Edwin H. Land. The first polaroid camera was shown in 1948 but photographers still needed to develop film taking more time. The first camera that printed out the picture right away was made in 1950, it was used to shorten the time it took to take and view a picture.

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The inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, developed the first instant camera as a hobby during World War II. After the war, the growth of the American economy made it possible for new industries to flourish. One of these industries was instant photography.

Polaroid photography focused on minimizing the time between taking the photograph and viewing the image. However, the first Polaroid camera, which debuted in 1948, still relied on the photographer to time the development of the film, pull out the print to burst a pod of developing chemicals, and peel away the top film. These first film prints were in sepia-tone, followed by black-and-white prints in 1950. The Polaroid company actually published a magazine advertisement for their black-and-white film before it was available, and their employees worked quickly to meet public demand.

As instant camera technology progressed, it became possible for the prints to develop within a minute before the eyes of the user (oftentimes, people would wave Polaroids in the air to encourage faster image development). After the popular black-and-white prints came the peel-apart color prints in 1963, and non-peel-apart color prints followed in 1972. By 1977, the height of its popularity, Polaroid held two-thirds of the instant camera market, despite competition from Kodak.

Around 1979, the sales of instant cameras began to decrease, as video cameras and 35-millimeter cameras became smaller and cheaper. Ultimately, Polaroid's innovations in instant photography created a public desire which would lead to their own demise at the hands of an even more instant medium - digital photography.

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The inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, developed the first instant camera as a hobby during World War II. After the war, the growth of the American economy made it possible for new industries to flourish. One of these industries was instant photography.

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The 1977 release of the straightforward point-and-shoot Konica C35 AF marked the beginning of mass-produced autofocus cameras. The first autofocus single-lens reflex camera was the Polaroid SX-70 Sonar OneStep, which was introduced in 1978

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In a camera obscura, an image is projected onto a wall or table on the other side of a small hole or lens at one side of the room that is dark. The term "camera obscura" can also refer to similar structures like a box or tent where an image from the outside is projected within.

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The camera was invented in 1816 by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who drew on generations' worth of contributions. This is one of the most significant innovations of all time, it has made it possible to take pictures and share them with people all over the world without having to physically be there.

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Though you might not realise it, digital cameras have been around for much longer. The initial digital camera, developed by Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, displayed images on its screen.

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In the past two weeks, you've probably shared at least one embarrassing photo with family or friends. The process, from taking the photo to sharing it, was practically instantaneous. Yet only 20 years ago, you would have had to load and unload film in your camera, drop the film off for processing, and then wait days before you'd know if you even had any images worth sharing.

Digital cameras have been around a lot longer than you might think, however. Invented in 1975 at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., the first digital camera displayed photos on its screen.

The Kodak digital camera has been commemorated as an IEEE Milestone. The dedication ceremony is scheduled for 26 April at the Kodak Center in Rochester. Registration is open; guests can attend in person or virtually.

"This was more than just a camera," IEEE Member Steven J. Sasson, inventor of the device, told The New York Times in 2015. "It was a photographic system to demonstrate the idea of an all-electronic camera that didn't use any consumables in the capturing and display of still photographic images."

Sasson says he never anticipated how the imaging of everything would become so ubiquitous.

"Photos have become the universal form of casual conversation," he said in a 2018 interview with The Institute. "And cameras are present in almost every type of environment, including in our own homes."
COMPLETING A DIFFICULT TASK
Eastman Kodak wanted to find a way to digitize images using a charged coupled device-specifically Fairchild Semiconductor 's 100-by-100-pixel CCD. The company assigned the job to Sasson in 1974, when he joined Kodak as an electronics engineer working in the apparatus division's research lab.

CCDs, which were invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs, consist of a sensor that converts an incoming two-dimensional light pattern into an electrical signal that in turn becomes an image. In the case of Fairchild's CCD, the image would be a square: 100 by 100 pixels.

Although the CCDs could capture an image, they couldn't store it. So Sasson built a CCD into a camera with RAM to capture image data, which was then transferred to a cassette tape. In a 2016 interview with DIY Photography, he said cassettes were the only permanent form of "digital storage" available to him at the time. He designed it so each tape would store 30 images.

To build his digital camera, Sasson scavenged a lens and an exposure mechanism from a Kodak XL55 movie camera. They served as his camera's optics and were enclosed in a blue, rectangular box. The box also had a switch on the side that turned the device on and off and served as the camera's shutter-release button. The blue box sat atop a layer of a half dozen circuit boards and 16 AA batteries. Enclosed in an open steel frame, all of the parts could be seen. The frame also could unfold to make it easier to modify the camera. A portable Memodyne cassette recorder that was attached to the side of the frame held the tape. The camera weighed 3.6 kilograms and was about the size of a toaster.

The photographer flipped the switch once to turn on the camera and flipped it a second time to take a photo. The CCD would capture the image, which would then run through a Motorola analog-to-digital converter and be stored temporarily in a DRAM array of a dozen 4,096-bit chips. The image was then transferred to the cassette.

Sasson and his colleagues invented a device to take the information stored on the tape and turn it into digital images. This playback unit converted the data to a standard NTSC signal so the images could be displayed on a TV screen.

After a year of working on the camera, Sasson took his first photo in December 1975. It was of a Kodak lab technician, Joy Marshall.

"It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape," Sasson said in the 2015 Times article. "I'd pop the cassette tape out, hand it to my assistant, and he would put it in our playback unit. About 30 seconds later, up popped the 100-pixel-by-100-pixel black-and-white image."

But when Sasson displayed the photo on the lab's computer, the image's flaws were apparent. The camera could render shades that were clearly dark or light, things in between appeared as static, according to a 2020 IEEE Spectrum article about digital cameras. Therefore, Marshall's face was not visible in the photograph.

Sasson fixed those problems and was granted a U.S. patent for the camera in 1978, but it was never put into production. Even after a few demonstrations of how the camera worked, Kodak executives said they didn't see a market for it. Sasson wasn't allowed to publicly talk about the camera or show his prototype to anyone outside of Kodak, according to an article on the camera onThe Vintage News.

That didn't deter Sasson, who continued to build more cameras for Kodak. In 1994 he built one of the first commercially available digital cameras-the AP NC2000-in collaboration with Nikon.

Today Sasson's original digital camera is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C.

Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Rochester (N.Y.) Section sponsored the nomination for the digital camera. Its Milestone plaque, which is to be displayed in the lobby of the Kodak Center, reads:
A self-contained portable digital camera was invented at an Eastman Kodak Company laboratory. It used movie camera optics, a charge-coupled device as an electronic light sensor, a temporary buffer of random-access memory, and image storage on a digital cassette. Subsequent commercial digital cameras using flash memory storage revolutionized how images are captured, processed, and shared, creating opportunities in commerce, education, and global communications.

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The First Digital Camera Was the Size of a Toaster

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In the past two weeks, you've probably shared at least one embarrassing photo with family or friends. The process, from taking the photo to sharing it, was practically instantaneous. Yet only 20 years ago, you would have had to load and unload film in your camera, drop the film off for processing, and then wait days before you'd know if you even had any images worth sharing.

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There are several Camera Obscuras besides the one we have. In truth, camera obscuras have been around since at least 400 BC, possibly much earlier than written records. A Chinese philosopher by the name of Mo-tzu (or Mozi) published the oldest recorded textual description of a camera obscura about 400 BC. He observed that when light from a lit object entered a dark space through a pinhole, the result was an inverted version of the original object. Greek philosopher Aristotle discovered that a partial eclipse may be seen by staring at the ground beneath a tree in the fourth century BC.

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Camera Obscura and World of Illusions Edinburgh

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Camera obscuras through time

Have you ever wondered what a camera obscura actually is and where the idea came from? Well, you've come to the right place! We're going to peer through the lens of time and take a look at the history of the famous camera obscura.

How it works

In its simplest form, a camera obscura is a dark room with a small hole in one wall. When it's bright outside, light enters through the hole and projects an upside down image of the outside world onto the wall opposite the hole. Did you know that the name camera obscura is actually Latin and translates to "dark chamber"?

Our Camera Obscura is a little more complex than this, but it's based on the same principle. We have a mirror at the top of our tower which is angled to reflect light down a large tube which contains three lenses. These lenses focus the light onto a white wooden table, projecting an image of the view outside. The mirror tilts and rotates allowing us to see a 360-degree view of Edinburgh and the lenses allow us to see the image the right way up.

How it began

Our Camera Obscura isn't the only one in existence. In fact, camera obscuras date back to as far as 400BC, possibly even before records existed.

The earliest known written account of a camera obscura was provided by a Chinese philosopher called Mo-tzu (or Mozi) in 400BC. He noted that light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted image of the original object.

In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle realised that a partial eclipse could be viewed by looking at the ground beneath a tree. The crescent shape of the partially eclipsed sun projected onto the ground through the holes in a sieve and through the gaps between the leaves allowing him to view it safely.

Several other scientists experimented with light passing through a small hole, but it wasn't until the 11 th century that a viewing screen was used to see the inverted image. 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.

Four centuries later Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) suggested that the human eye is like a camera obscura. He went on to publish the first clear description of the camera obscura in Codex Atlanticus (1502).

Up until this point in time, the camera obscura had been described, but it wasn't actually improved upon until an Italian scholar named Giambattista della Porta (1535 - 1615) came along and added a concave lens near to where light enters the pinhole.

A few years later Johannes Kepler used the term "camera obscura" for the first time in 1604. Kepler used the camera obscura for astronomical applications and created a portable version that he carried around with him as a tent for surveying Upper Austria.

So now the camera obscura had been described, named and even improved upon, but it was still quite a large object to carry around. This led to a portable box-like version being created, which was used by many artists in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, such as Vermeer and Canaletto.

Edinburgh's Camera Obscura

In Victorian times, larger camera obscuras became a popular seaside attraction, allowing groups of people to experience the phenomenon together. It was at this time that our Camera Obscura story begins. In 1835 Maria Theresa Short set up a "popular observatory" on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. She ran demonstrations of the Camera Obscura right up until 9pm every day. After breaking council rules for leafletting, she was unfortunately evicted in 1849. But this didn't stop her, Maria purchased a new property on Castlehill, added two additional floors and opened up Short's Observatory in 1853 which housed the Camera Obscura that we are still running today!

When Maria passed away, the building was taken over by Sir Patrick Geddes who renamed it the Outlook Tower, deciding to refocus the Camera Obscura away from tourism and onto education and philosophy. He would rush people up the five flights of stairs to stimulate blood flow and oxygen to the brain - opening peoples' minds and allowing them to get more from the experience.

Edinburgh University owned the building from about 1940, before we took over in 1977. Since then, we've continued the work that Maria Short and Patrick Geddes started, plunging you even further into a world of science and wonder and continuing to display those incredible 360-degree views over Edinburgh through our Camera Obscura.

Camera obscuras across the world

Did you know, our Camera Obscura isn't the only one still in use today, there are several others across the globe: View this image bigger here.

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What is a camera obscura? - Camera Obscura and World of Illusions Edinburgh

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A glimpse through the lens of time to explore the incredible camera obscura

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The first photo taken off of a phone was in 1997. Inventor, Philippe Kahn, created a camera phone solution that was able to be shared to the public instantly. Kahn's motivation into creating the camera phone solution was to take a photo of her new born daughter.

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On June 11th, 1997, Philippe Kahn created the first camera phone solution to share pictures instantly on public networks. The impetus for this invention was the birth of Kahn's daughter, when he jerry-rigged a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent photos in real time.

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Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
Even though Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a Frenchman, is commonly acknowledged to have invented the first photographic camera in 1816, the camera's development was based on contributions from centuries prior. The earliest existing photograph was created by Niépce circa 1826 and was created on silver chloride-lined paper. The University of Texas in Austin is still featuring the original photograph on display.

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When Was The Camera Invented? Everything You Need To Know - NFI

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Nowadays, having a great camera on your smartphone and being able to “catch the experience” at all times is regarded as entirely usual, but this was not the case ten years ago.

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The first colored photo was taken by Thomas Sutton, but was assisted by James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell theorized that using a 3-colored method that reproduced red, green and blue light colors would bring the true color in a photo. This was called the "addictive color process".

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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Steve Sasson invented the first ever digital camera in 1975. Growing up, Sasson was very drawn to electronic technology and he built an amateur radio at 13. He ended up contacting a banned frequency and got in trouble with federal communications. This goes to show his passion for technology.

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National Inventors Hall of Fame®(NIHF) Inductee Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, has always been a creative disrupter.

As a child growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he was immediately drawn to electronics and was never one to shy away from exploring new technologies. His innate passion and tenacity are illustrated in this story from his early years. After building an amateur radio at age 13 he accidentally sent out a signal on a banned frequency and received a letter from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

"My father simply couldn't understand how this kid could get in trouble with the federal authorities," Sasson said in an interview with NIHF. "We sent the letter back and it was fine, but I remember that was the first time that I felt my parents didn't know what to do with me."

Sasson's interest in technology continued to grow, and he attended Brooklyn Technical High School before graduating with both a bachelor's and master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Right out of graduate school, he landed a job working at a research laboratory at the Eastman Kodak Company and was amazed that he had found a job doing what he enjoyed most of all: tinkering with electronics.

"The most amazing thing about being at Kodak was that they paid me to do what I loved," Sasson said. "They had all the parts right there, and it was actually a lot easier to do some of this stuff there than it was when I was in Brooklyn."

At Kodak, Sasson's supervisor Gareth Lloyd tasked him with finding a practical use for the recently created charged coupled device (CCD) - a mechanism that captures light and transfers into usable data.

"Hardly anybody knew I was working on this, because it wasn't that big of a project," Sasson recalled in an interview with The New York Times. "It wasn't secret. It was just a project to keep me from getting into trouble doing something else, I guess."

Inventing the Digital Camera

Over the course of a year, Sasson was given complete autonomy. His experience taking apart electronics as a child made him think about how electrical pulses could be displayed as a two-dimensional pattern, much like how a television works. He wondered if this same concept could be applied to an all-electric camera design that contained no moving parts and committed himself to creating such a device.

Each day Sasson had had the unique opportunity to pioneer new advances in his field. While his days were filled with excitement, he also experienced his fair share of uncertainty. Because no road map existed, the only path he followed was the one he created.

"I'd take my shower in the morning, and I'd say, 'why did I say I was going to build this stupid camera?'" Sasson said. "Why did I tell people I was going to do this?"

However, he did not give up, and his resolve paid off. In December 1975, he produced a device that combined a lens from a Super-8 movie camera, 16 nickel cadmium batteries, an analog/digital converter, a CCD imaging area array, an A/D converter and several dozen digital and analog circuits wired together on half a dozen circuit boards: the world's first digital camera.

While today we live in a world where life without digital photography seems unimaginable, Kodak was reluctant to embrace this new technology. Because the company had a lucrative monopoly on the film photography market in the United States, they saw little reason to disrupt the status quo.

This decision would prove costly. Though Sasson continued working on digital camera technology, and with his colleague Robert Hills created the first self-contained DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera in 1989. However, Kodak declined to sell the product in order to protect their film sales. The DSLR camera would go on to dominate the digital camera market, and gave consumers both the convenience of shooting digitally, and quality that eventually surpassed that of film. While Kodak's digital camera patent portfolio earned the company billions of dollars, the company was slow to adopt digital photography and in 2012 filed for bankruptcy.

A Legacy of Innovation

For inventing the digital camera, and revolutionizing the way people communicate with one other, President Barack Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and in 2012 the Royal Photographic Society awarded him the prestigious Progress Medal.

Today, Sasson dedicates his time to promoting the importance of creativity and inspiring students to improve the world by creating innovative solutions. His personal story is featured throughout NIHF's educational programs, and he is an official member of the Innovation Force, a team of NIHF Inductees turned comic superheroes who motivate kids to take risks and pursue their dreams.

To learn more about Steve Sasson, and the story of how he invented the digital camera, we invite you to watch this video!

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National Inventors Hall of Fame®(NIHF) Inductee Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, has always been a creative disrupter. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he was immediately drawn to electronics and was never one to shy away from exploring new technologies.

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The first recognized camera was invented in 1816. The often credited inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is known worldwide as the "Father of Photography." This article shows the development of the camera over time and its history.

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When Was The Camera Invented? Everything You Need To Know - NFI

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Nowadays, having a great camera on your smartphone and being able to “catch the experience” at all times is regarded as entirely usual, but this was not the case ten years ago.

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Before Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera in 1973, photography was a slow process that was impossible to master without years of study. Sasson revolutionized photographic technology by inventing digital photography at only 24 years old. After just arriving at Kodak, Sasson was given a busy project to keep himself away from trouble, but while trying to store an image, Stasson decided to use digitalization to help store information digitally. This project resulted in the first digital camera. It had taken only 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but 23 seconds to record it to tape. When he took this idea to marketing, their response was only lukewarm, and they were convinced that no one would want to look at their pictures on a television set instead of print. The first digital camera was patented in 1978, and was called the electronic still camera. The camera never saw the light of day. Only when it was too late did Kodak start to embrace the digital camera. Now, it is used throughout the world, especially throughout the 2000s, and has advanced in technology and has seen a recent renaissance in the 2020s.

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In the mid-1970s a young engineer invented the digital photographic process. Some of his bosses were not impressed. His employer? Eastman Kodak.

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Edwin H. Land, was the inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, he created the initial instant camera as a hobby during World War II. The goal of Polaroid photography was to get the picture to you as quickly as possible. When the original Polaroid camera was introduced in 1948, it was still up to the photographer to time the film's development, remove the print to release the pod of chemicals and peel off the top film. In 1950, black-and-white prints were introduced after the initial sepia-tone prints.

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The inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, developed the first instant camera as a hobby during World War II. After the war, the growth of the American economy made it possible for new industries to flourish. One of these industries was instant photography.

Polaroid photography focused on minimizing the time between taking the photograph and viewing the image. However, the first Polaroid camera, which debuted in 1948, still relied on the photographer to time the development of the film, pull out the print to burst a pod of developing chemicals, and peel away the top film. These first film prints were in sepia-tone, followed by black-and-white prints in 1950. The Polaroid company actually published a magazine advertisement for their black-and-white film before it was available, and their employees worked quickly to meet public demand.

As instant camera technology progressed, it became possible for the prints to develop within a minute before the eyes of the user (oftentimes, people would wave Polaroids in the air to encourage faster image development). After the popular black-and-white prints came the peel-apart color prints in 1963, and non-peel-apart color prints followed in 1972. By 1977, the height of its popularity, Polaroid held two-thirds of the instant camera market, despite competition from Kodak.

Around 1979, the sales of instant cameras began to decrease, as video cameras and 35-millimeter cameras became smaller and cheaper. Ultimately, Polaroid's innovations in instant photography created a public desire which would lead to their own demise at the hands of an even more instant medium - digital photography.

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The inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, developed the first instant camera as a hobby during World War II. After the war, the growth of the American economy made it possible for new industries to flourish. One of these industries was instant photography.

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Who Invented the First Camera? (Mia Pitt)

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Who Invented the First Camera? (Mia Pitt)

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Many have claimed to have invented the first camera, however the search can be narrowed down depending on what kind of camera people consider the “first”. The camera obscura, which was a small dark room and projected an inverted image onto a large screen through a hole, was invented by philosopher Mozi in Han China. Interestingly, Iraqi scientist Ibn Al-Haytham made mention of a camera obscura in his Book of Optics in 1021, and is also credited as one of the first inventors of the camera obscura. Johan Zahn designed the first camera that was smaller and more portable than the original camera obscuras in 1685, but his ideas hadn’t come to light until the 1800s. In 1825, Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first camera for photography with a process called heliography. Although, the images he took weren’t permanent. In 1837, Louis Daguerre made the first “daguerreotypes”, which were photographs made using salt solution and silver coated plates. Daguerre and Niepce collaborated on how to make the images permanent until Niepce’s death. Alphonse Giroux was the first to manufacture the first commercial daguerreotype camera. Ultimately, Daguerre is considered the first to invent practical photography, but not without help from all of the inventors that came before him.

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As you can imagine, the history of the first camera is quite complex and lengthy. Technically, the history of the first camera came long before photography. When people think of the first camera, they are most likely imagining a piece of technology that can produce actual photos. But the first camer…

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How Polaroid Changed Photography (Mia Pitt)

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How Polaroid Changed Photography (Mia Pitt)

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While it may seem retro and vintage, the Polaroid camera was considered a feat of technology that helped revolutionize the future of photography forever. Before the Polaroid was invented in the 1970s, people taking photos had to wait days and weeks to see their pictures. So, when the Polaroid camera that could snap and give you your pictures in an instant was invented in 1972, people marveled at the technology, and it became the new it-camera of the 70s. This camera also helped contribute to some of the aesthetic elements we see on social media. Polaroid helped to bring people together, so you can watch your photos being developed in real time and then give them away. There was no editing or Photoshop to manipulate these images, people only had their raw surroundings to provide them with a good photo. Taking a photo on a Polaroid camera was an intimate experience, and has captured memories instantly, changing the world of photography forever.

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Written by Matthew Ponsford, CNN

Long before Polaroid pictures invoked sun-bleached nostalgia, dreamlike memories and a lust for a bygone analog age, they were considered a flash of impossibly futuristic technology.

When the company's SX-70 OneStep instant camera was released in 1972, the US was still drafting conscripts for the Vietnam War, the Sony Walkman was seven years away and most people had to wait days -- or even weeks -- to see the pictures they'd snapped.

For acclaimed director and photographer Wim Wenders, who arrived in the USA from his native Germany that year, the SX-70 was the epitome of progress. The device was a technological marvel.

He went on to take 12,000 Polaroid photos in a frenzy of creativity in the early 1970s. The format was "at the dawn of the digital age, a promise of things to come," said Wenders in an email interview.

"For years, everybody would stand behind you and look at the little print, not only in amazement, but also with longing -- 'Gimme that thing!'" said Wenders, who directed the epic road movie "Paris, Texas" and the Oscar-nominated documentary "Buena Vista Social Club."

"Kids especially went crazy. Today, we take it for granted that we can see everything immediately on ... our devices, but then, it was nothing less than a cultural revolution. We all felt we were looking at the future. And we were."

Square Polaroid snaps captured the world's attention in the 1970s, and have remained the subject of fascination since. Their fun aesthetic continues to influence creatives like photographer Ryan McGinley and artist Julian Schnabel. Instagram may also owe some of its early success to its imitation of the shape and look of classic Polaroid photos.

Christopher Bonanos, author of "Instant: The Story of Polaroid," compares Polaroid to Apple, which would launch a home computing revolution later that decade.

A design-focused tech giant in its heyday, Polaroid had its own Steve Jobs in the form of inventor Edwin Land, who produced the company's first instant camera in 1948. Land attributed his invention to his daughter's restlessness at having to wait to see the pictures he had taken.

Polaroid photos exploded in popularity following the launch of the SX-70. Artists including David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Ansel Adams embraced the playful camera and pushed it to its technical limits. Between them, they produced collages, selfies and thousands of portraits -- often front-on images, focused on the square's center, which became the format's signature composition.

Ongoing appeal

At the German gallery C/O Berlin this month, two new exhibitions are celebrating the past and present of the Polaroid format. One of the shows features a selection of Wenders' photographs, capturing Hollywood stars like Dennis Hopper, as well as the unglamorous minutiae of the filmmaker's life in 1972 -- like his breakfasts -- that would have barely warranted capturing on film before Polaroid.

The second exhibition, named " The Polaroid Project," features instant photos by leading artists such as Chuck Close, Guy Bourdin, Nobuyoshi Araki, Barbara Crane, Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Rauschenberg.

According to co-curator at C/O Berlin, Anna Duque y González, it is a sense of intimacy that brings us back to Polaroid.

"Polaroid was a real social medium, when (the idea of being) social was still bound to people," she said in a phone interview.

"You would watch these pictures being developed -- it took time, you watched it together, then you would give it away. It was a real act of humans being with each other. Nowadays, with social media, everything has become so abstract."

The format's ongoing popularity, more than 45 years after the release of the SX-70, reflects its position between photography's past and future. It sits between the analog and the digital, between photography as a considered craft and a reflex act -- like the Instagram snaps it would inspire, but with a precious object created between photographer and subject

González said that Wenders gave away two-thirds of the images he shot in the 1970s, believing that they belonged as much to the subject as him.

"That's why the Polaroid is now so successful again, because there's that longing for real relationships and real objects, and not everything just being digital," she said. "It is still important nowadays as a comment on the world becoming more abstract and digital -- and maybe, somehow, more fake."

The future of Polaroid

After making rough starts to the digital age, Polaroid and its old rival, FujiFilm, both threw their weight behind attempts to revive physical instant photos. Nonetheless, Polaroid ended its film and analog camera production in 2008 amid dwindling sales and a second bankruptcy.

A European company called Impossible Project acquired the rights to Polaroid's intellectual property and continued to produce its instant film. The group secured the Polaroid name in May 2017 and brought its film and cameras (under the brand Polaroid Originals) to the market last September.

In the meantime, contemporary artists have continued exploring the limits and meaning of instant film. For many, the format remains an ultimate expression of nostalgic fun that harks back to a time when the future seemed brighter.

Some nod to the tousled glamour of Andy Warhol and Edo Bertoglio's Factory-era Polaroids -- those high-contrast, nonchalant portraits of Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Madonna -- while others have used the format to bring intimacy to political issues such as the migrant crisis.

But in the age of high-resolution phone cameras, some, including Wenders, believe that the Polaroid's time is up. The filmmaker, who recently debuted his documentary "Pope Francis: A Man of his Word," has consistently embraced new technology, including the use of 3D filming for his 2011 dance documentary "Pina."

Wenders is still prone to nostalgia, admitting that he wishes he had saved more of his Polaroids. "Oh, man, if only I had kept half of them!" he said, expressing his desire to see images that Dennis Hopper, who died in 2010, took of himself during a key scene in the 1977 movie "The American Friend."

"(Hopper) made a whole series of selfies with the SX70, (then he) laid down on a pool table and let those Polaroids rain down on him. It was a strange act of remorse, or some ritual of self-purification.

"We used a new pack of film each time, and we shot several takes of that scene. But there's not a single one of these Polaroids left. Either Dennis kept them all, or everybody in the crew grabbed one."

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Polaroid: How a square-shaped nostalgia symbol paved the way for social media

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Written by Matthew Ponsford, CNN Long before Polaroid pictures invoked sun-bleached nostalgia, dreamlike memories and a lust for a bygone analog age, they were considered a flash of impossibly futuristic technology.

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Modern photography, a period that saw a change from conventional pictorial photography to a more direct method of taking pictures, greatly made use of the camera itself rather than just using a tool to take pictures. The development of modern photography began in the 1900s and continued until the 1960s. This new trend began investigating the photographs produced by direct camera manipulation.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that marked the shift from traditional pictorialist photography to a more direct way of capturing photos, exploiting, and emphasizing the use of and nature of the camera instead of using it as a tool to capture images.

You can find more about other types of photography in a previous article here.

Modern Photography: The History

Modern photography started in the 1900s and lasted until the 1960s, but the influence of its proponents remains to this day.

This period began with a gradual departure from the principles and limitations that traditional art imposed on photography, such as the taking of photos that resembled painting subjects and the use of soft, almost painterly focus.

While these photos were produced through manipulation of the photographs themselves, this new movement started exploring the photographic results of direct manipulation of the camera, using it as a tool to capture lines, shapes, light and shadow, textures, and subjects as they appeared in front of the lens.

Due to this shift in how cameras were being used, modern photography also explored new areas not covered by traditional photography such as social documentation. Straight Photography, an offshoot of Modern photography focused on capturing truthful records of life as seen by the photographer.

Early modern photographers took to street photography while still keeping true to aesthetic principles that ruled other forms of art like patterns and form, framing, and juxtaposition of subjects in their surroundings to create a statement.

Modern Photography Characteristics

Images also emphasized sharp focus and detail. Straight photography laid the foundations for other innovations in photography such as photojournalism, documentary photography, street photography, and snapshot photography.

Modern photography also gave birth to movements like Constructivism. It was promoted by photographers who believed that modern photography should help construct and not merely document the real world.

These photographs were noted for their precision and geometric simplicity which were the result fo a focus on photography as a technical exercise and the photographer as a technician.

Fashion photography also flourished during this time, with a focus not only on the wearer but also on the garment. Fashion photography grew fast through the 20s and 30s led by magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Photojournalism also developed during this period, driven by war photographers and the influence of magazines like Life. Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson were well-known proponents.

Another Shift

Modern photography underwent another major shift with the move from analog to digital which started in the 80s with the invention of the first digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop.

Aside from the expansion of the photographer's ability to capture more photos, the digital medium also allowed more freedom in manipulating photos during post-processing.

While this ability led to discussions on the repercussions of the truthfulness of photography it also led to more creative approaches taking advantage of the ability to change and transform images such as digital collages double prints and alteration.

The shift to digital photography also naturally led to the proliferation of photo taking and picture sharing and the ability of almost anyone to capture, edit, and share photos using mobile devices.

Important Modern Photographers

Well-known proponents of modern photography include Alfred Steiglitz, the foremost promoter of modern photography and straight photography, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.

Tina Modotti was born in Italy. She moved to the United States at a young age. In San Francisco, she worked as a model and as an actress in theatre. Tia Modotti later moved to Mexico with her partner Edward Weston who influenced her photography. Focusing on social documentary and mixing politics and art, she collaborated with artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. With them, she produced her most relevant body of work. Fo

Alfred Stieglitz believed that photography was an art form. However, he also figured in the Photo-Secession movement or the gradual move away from pictorialist images to images that were more real and faithful representations of the image in front of the lens.
Ansel Adams and Edward Weston founded the f/64 group in the 30s, focusing on modern photography of the American West.

Paul Strand was a proponent of modern, straight, and documentary photography and used large-format cameras to take pictures. He influenced the founding of the f/64 group and pushed the development of straight photography to documentary photography. Later works touched on the use o photography for social and political purposes.

Robert Capa was a war photographer best known for redefining war photojournalism. He offered a closer perspective of war because he was embedded in the trenches in World War II and earlier wars.

Henri Cartier-Bresson popularized candid photography and the use of a 35 mm film. He was one of the founders of Magnum Photos along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, among others. He is known for viewing photography as the act of capturing the decisive moment. Cartier- Bresson's influence on street, documentary, and photojournalistic photography remains to this day.

Read about more modern photography artists here.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that marked the shift from traditional pictorialist photography to a more direct way of capturing photos, exploiting, and emphasizing the use of and nature of the camera instead of using it as a tool to capture images.

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Photography has developed greatly over the years. It is much easier to capture/emphasize a photo today than it was in the past. Cameras can now pick up lines, shapes, and light in a photograph.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that marked the shift from traditional pictorialist photography to a more direct way of capturing photos, exploiting, and emphasizing the use of and nature of the camera instead of using it as a tool to capture images.

You can find more about other types of photography in a previous article here.

Modern Photography: The History

Modern photography started in the 1900s and lasted until the 1960s, but the influence of its proponents remains to this day.

This period began with a gradual departure from the principles and limitations that traditional art imposed on photography, such as the taking of photos that resembled painting subjects and the use of soft, almost painterly focus.

While these photos were produced through manipulation of the photographs themselves, this new movement started exploring the photographic results of direct manipulation of the camera, using it as a tool to capture lines, shapes, light and shadow, textures, and subjects as they appeared in front of the lens.

Due to this shift in how cameras were being used, modern photography also explored new areas not covered by traditional photography such as social documentation. Straight Photography, an offshoot of Modern photography focused on capturing truthful records of life as seen by the photographer.

Early modern photographers took to street photography while still keeping true to aesthetic principles that ruled other forms of art like patterns and form, framing, and juxtaposition of subjects in their surroundings to create a statement.

Modern Photography Characteristics

Images also emphasized sharp focus and detail. Straight photography laid the foundations for other innovations in photography such as photojournalism, documentary photography, street photography, and snapshot photography.

Modern photography also gave birth to movements like Constructivism. It was promoted by photographers who believed that modern photography should help construct and not merely document the real world.

These photographs were noted for their precision and geometric simplicity which were the result fo a focus on photography as a technical exercise and the photographer as a technician.

Fashion photography also flourished during this time, with a focus not only on the wearer but also on the garment. Fashion photography grew fast through the 20s and 30s led by magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Photojournalism also developed during this period, driven by war photographers and the influence of magazines like Life. Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson were well-known proponents.

Another Shift

Modern photography underwent another major shift with the move from analog to digital which started in the 80s with the invention of the first digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop.

Aside from the expansion of the photographer's ability to capture more photos, the digital medium also allowed more freedom in manipulating photos during post-processing.

While this ability led to discussions on the repercussions of the truthfulness of photography it also led to more creative approaches taking advantage of the ability to change and transform images such as digital collages double prints and alteration.

The shift to digital photography also naturally led to the proliferation of photo taking and picture sharing and the ability of almost anyone to capture, edit, and share photos using mobile devices.

Important Modern Photographers

Well-known proponents of modern photography include Alfred Steiglitz, the foremost promoter of modern photography and straight photography, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.

Tina Modotti was born in Italy. She moved to the United States at a young age. In San Francisco, she worked as a model and as an actress in theatre. Tia Modotti later moved to Mexico with her partner Edward Weston who influenced her photography. Focusing on social documentary and mixing politics and art, she collaborated with artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. With them, she produced her most relevant body of work. Fo

Alfred Stieglitz believed that photography was an art form. However, he also figured in the Photo-Secession movement or the gradual move away from pictorialist images to images that were more real and faithful representations of the image in front of the lens.
Ansel Adams and Edward Weston founded the f/64 group in the 30s, focusing on modern photography of the American West.

Paul Strand was a proponent of modern, straight, and documentary photography and used large-format cameras to take pictures. He influenced the founding of the f/64 group and pushed the development of straight photography to documentary photography. Later works touched on the use o photography for social and political purposes.

Robert Capa was a war photographer best known for redefining war photojournalism. He offered a closer perspective of war because he was embedded in the trenches in World War II and earlier wars.

Henri Cartier-Bresson popularized candid photography and the use of a 35 mm film. He was one of the founders of Magnum Photos along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, among others. He is known for viewing photography as the act of capturing the decisive moment. Cartier- Bresson's influence on street, documentary, and photojournalistic photography remains to this day.

Read about more modern photography artists here.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that marked the shift from traditional pictorialist photography to a more direct way of capturing photos, exploiting, and emphasizing the use of and nature of the camera instead of using it as a tool to capture images.

# data[].attributes.body
Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer, developed the first digital camera in 1975. The prototype camera was constructed from kits and spare components found around the Kodak facility, including Motorola components, a movie camera lens, and some brand-new Fairchild CCD electronic sensors. The camera was about the size of a toaster, weighed approximately ten pounds, and was quite large. All pictures came out in black and white as well.

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Today, everyone with a smartphone also has a digital camera in their pocket. It's a luxury that we've come so accustomed to that it's taken for granted.

Heck, just 15 years ago, you had to tote around a digital camera along with your cell phone if you wanted to commemorate the night out.

And 15 years before that ... well, the word digital was just a blip on the radar.

So, when did the digital camera become the norm for capturing memories quickly and easily? Let's take a trip down memory lane, digital style.

Who invented the digital camera?

It's pretty far out, but the first digital camera was created by Kodak engineer Steve Sasson in 1975. Built using parts of kits and leftovers laying around the Kodak factory, including Motorola bits, a movie-camera lens and some brand spanking new Fairchild CCD electronic sensors, the prototype camera barely resembled the sleek and stylish devices of today's digital shutter bugs. In fact, the camera was so big and heavy that it was nearly the size of a toaster and weighed about 10 lbs. It also took the better part of 25 seconds to capture just a single image ... in black and white, no less.

Oh, and let's not forget the whopping .01 megapixel resolution. Looking back at the prototype, it's easy to scoff at it, but for the time, it was revolutionary. In fact, had Kodak jumped on the digital pony early, they may have continued their film pioneering status well into the 21st century.

The decline of film?

By the late 70s, the prospect of a digital camera was making the rounds. And in 1981, Sony kickstarted the filmless age with the Sony Mavica. This magnetic video camera wasn't actually a digital camera per se, but an analog television camera which stored its pictures on two-inch floppy disks called Mavipaks. These floppy drives could hold an astonishing ... wait for it ... 50 colored photos for playback on a TV or monitor. The camera itself ran off a healthy dose of AA batteries.

Sony's Mavica led the charge of a slew of other analog cameras like the Canon Xapshot that recorded on electronic media. Not truly digital, these cameras served as a bridge between what was and what was to come.

The arrival of digital

In 1988, the first true digital camera was the Fuji DS-1P - only it never sold. However, it was a testament to how recorded images could be saved onto computerized files via 16MB SRAM internal memory cards. This also led to 1988 being the first year JPEG and MPEG standards were created.

What was the first consumer digital camera then?

The first digital camera to hit store shelves was the 1990 Dycam Model 1. With digital picture storage, the Dycam could connect directly to a PC for downloads. And just like that, the 1990s became the decade of digital determination.

In 1991, digital came to SLR systems like the Hasselblad DB 4000 with a whopping 8-bit storage. This is also around the time that Adobe PhotoShop 1.0 became a thing.

Staking digital claim

By the mid 90s, it seemed that everyone wanted in on the digital action. In fact, even Apple tried its hand in the digital camera market with the Apple QuickTake 100 in 1994. Manufactured by Kodak, the QuickTake was the first color digital camera for under $1,000. Yeah, you read that correctly. With a 640x480-pixel CCD, the QuickTake could store a measly eight images in its internal memory. How far we've come ...

The LCD screen makes its debut

The mid-90s also gave us a glimpse at what was to come thanks to the Casio QV-10 in 1995, which featured the first LCD screen on the back of the camera. The screen was less than 2 inches but it ushered in the template for cameras to come. It could also hold up to 96 color images but still couldn't get past that $1,000 price tag.

Digital and here to stay

Although more digital camera tech innovation would appear throughout the remainder of the 1990s, like incorporation of sound and webcams and compact cameras, the gist of the digital age had been ushered in. Heck, even the first camera phones began to appear in the late 90s, albeit with a terrible megapixel count.

By the mid-2000s, the digital camera hasn't changed much other than breakthroughs in LCD screen resolution, and of course, megapixel count. You look at a photo taken on your phone today and it's going to look even better than a photo taken with an actual digital camera 15 years ago.

So where does digital go from here? Well, that's just something we'll have to wait and see to find out. In the meantime, if you have some old analog photos or film that you'd like digitized

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Today, everyone with a smartphone also has a digital camera in their pocket. It's a luxury that we've come so accustomed to that it's taken for granted. Heck, just 15 years ago, you had to tote around a digital camera along with your cell phone if you wanted to commemorate the night out.

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In the 1960s, many focusing techniques such as scale focus, rangefinder, and SLR were used. In 1977, the first successful auto focus camera, the Konica C35 AF, was invented. It was the first fully automated point and shoot camera and was the basis for many later models that engulfed the market until the 2000s. However, this cameras focusing system was adapted by taking three distinct zones (infinity, 3 meters, and 1.1 meters) and figuring out which one gave an image the best focus. Though the system was not as advanced, it still was simple enough to fit into a compact camera.

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Early Auto Focus Cameras — Aperture Preview

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The First auto focus cameras consisted of add on attachments and even a sonar system, it was the wild west for design and innovation. But the first true auto focus SLR came to be in 1985 and to critical acclaim

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The first coloured photograph was taken by Thomas Sutton but he collaborated with James Clerk Maxwell. It was in 1860 when he reproduced colour by mixing light colours of blue, green, and red. These were considered additive colour methods.

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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Philippe Kahn snapped and sent the initial cell phone picture in existence on June 11th, 1997. On that day, in a delivery room in Santa Cruz, California, Khan took a picture of his infant daughter with his electronic camera. Kahn created an amateur "camera phone" by leveraging his camera with a smartphone for the purpose of sending the pictures  to his camera as cellphone photos were non existent in that time period.

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Believe it or not, there was a time when photo sharing was a lot slower than in the age of digital photography, smartphone cameras, Instagram, and Snapchat. In the mid-1900s, instantaneously capturing and sharing photos online was unheard of. Then in 1997, the first camera phone was born.

The First 'Camera Phone' Photograph

The very first camera phone photo in history was captured and sent back on June 11th, 1997 by an entrepreneur named Philippe Kahn. On that date, Khan captured a photo of his newborn daughter with his digital camera in a maternity ward at Sutter Maternity Center in Santa Cruz, California.

Since "camera phones" didn't exist at that time, Kahn actually hacked together a primitive one by combining his digital camera and a cell phone to send the photos across the Web in real-time.

The makeshift setup consisted of a Motorola StarTAC flip phone, a Casio QV digital camera, and a Toshiba 430CDT laptop computer, according to IEEE Spectrum. Whenever he captured a 320×240-pixel photo with the camera, the setup would automatically connect to his web server and upload the photo and then send email notifications to friends and family to provide a link to the new image.

"I had always wanted to have this all working in time to share my daughter's birth photo," Kahn tells IEEE Spectrum, "but I wasn't sure I was going to make it."

Luckily for the inventor, though, his wife would spend 18 hours in labor, giving him sufficient time to get the system up and working before his daughter was born. All the components he needed were either in his car or available at a local Radio Shack that he sent an assistant to.

The Internet-connected camera phone allowed Kahn to share that photo with over 2,000 people he was connected to around the world, achieving a technological first and a landmark moment that transformed photography as we know it. It was the first time a digital photo had been sent between two people on the Internet.

One of the Most Influential Photos of All Time

In 2016, Time Magazine named Kahn's seminal camera phone photo one of the 100 most influential photos of all time. In 2017, the marketing studio Conscious Minds released a heartwarming 4-minute short film recreating the story of Kahn's now-famous photo.

In the film, Kahn tells the story of how he hacked together a mess of wires, phones, laptops, and cameras to enable the instant delivery of a photo of his new baby daughter. Armed with a soldering iron inside the hospital ward, he used a wire ripped from his car telephone to make his dream a reality.

A Photo Sharing Pioneer

At the time of his famous first photo, Khan had been working for nearly a year on Picture Mail, a web server-based system for sharing photos online. Khan says his goal had been to create a 21st-century version of the Polaroid instant camera, except the instant photos would be shared on the Web instead of through physical prints.

Khan integrated a microcontroller, CMOS sensor, and cell phone into a single device capable of wirelessly sharing photos and other multimedia, and in 1998 he founded a company called Lightsurf that was based on the technology.

At first, the inventor repeatedly struck out when pitching the technology to the major camera companies dominating the market.

"Kodak, Polaroid, and [other camera companies] [...] all had wireless camera projects, but none of them could imagine that the future was digital photography inside the phone, with Instant-Picture-Mail software and service infrastructure," Khan tells IEEE Spectrum. "They collectively came to the conclusion that phones would be focused on voice-this was before texting-and that cameras would become wireless."

Upon getting rejected by the major US-based camera corporations, Khan turned to Japan, where Sharp used LightSurf to create its popular "Sha-Mail" (or "Picture-Mail") phone. LightSurf went on to become an influential technology in picture messaging that became the foundation of multimedia messaging solutions in North America as well.

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How the First Camera Phone Photo Was Shot in 1997

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Believe it or not, there was a time when photo sharing was a lot slower than in the age of digital photography, smartphone cameras, Instagram, and Snapchat. In the mid-1900s, instantaneously capturing and sharing photos online was unheard of. Then in 1997, the first camera phone was born.

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A daguerreotype photograph was invented in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. This photograph is printed on a copper plate, and is coated with light sensitive chemicals before it is exposed. This type of photograph was intensely detailed and had a shiny surface, which allowed for it to be deemed as a cheaper replacement to oil painting for portraiture.

A calotype photograph was invented by Willian Henry Fod Talbot in the 1840s. It was recognizable for its soft texture, and lack of detail. This allowed for an emphasis on tone. These images were the first ever to have a negative to positive image process. A piece of paper was doused in chemicals allowing it to become light sensitive, then placed inside the camera. This recorded a negative image on the paper before exposure to light. These images were then printed in positive on salted paper, which was made light sensitive by being dipped in a chemical solution.

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This is a guest post by Sam Klotz, who developed the primary source set "Civil War Photographs: New Technologies and New Uses." Sam is a graduate of Stanford University and worked with the Library's education team as a Liljenquist Family Fellow.
When I was conducting research for the Library of Congress primary source set " Civil War Photographs: New Technologies and New Uses," I learned way more about photographic technologies that were used before the Civil War than I could fit into the brief teacher's guide. Here's a bit of what I learned about the calotype and the daguerreotype.

Invented in 1839 in Paris by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the daguerreotype was a photograph printed on a copper plate coated with light sensitive chemicals before exposure. Because of its intense detail and attractive shiny surface, it achieved success as a cheaper alternative to oil painting for portraiture, even though to have a daguerreotype taken, the subject had to sit facing direct light for a minute or longer without blinking or moving.

Some people criticized daguerreotypes for metaphysical reasons. French writer Honore de Balzac believed that people were made up of layers of skin and each time one had a daguerreotype taken, that person lost a layer of skin and thus a piece of his or her essence. Relatively inefficient and expensive compared to technologies like the ambrotype or tintype, the daguerreotype eventually went out of fashion later in the 19th century.

The calotype was the first ever negative-to-positive image process: a piece of paper bathed in chemicals so that it became light sensitive was placed inside the camera, which recorded a negative image on the paper upon exposure to light. These calotype negatives were then printed in positive on salted paper, a paper made light sensitive by being bathed in a chemical solution. Calotypes and salted paper were invented in England by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s and were recognizable for their soft texture and lack of detail, instead emphasizing tone.

Calotypes never caught on in the United States, as the American public preferred the shine and detail of the daguerreotype, brought to the United States by Samuel Morse, over the soft tones of the calotype. By the 1860s, calotypes were largely out of use because of the development of the wet-plate/collodion process.

However, despite their lack of longevity, both calotypes and daguerreotypes are extremely important processes in the history of the photographic medium. The daguerreotype was the first mode of photography ever invented, while the calotype was the first negative to positive photographic technology, providing the basis for photographic technologies still in use today.

For more examples of each, plus a teacher's guide, visit the primary source set " Civil War Photographs: New Technologies and New Uses." You might ask your students to discuss how the amount of time and effort required to create an image might affect what they decide to photograph. Let us know how they respond in the comments.

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Pre-Civil War Photographic Technologies: The Calotype and Daguerreotype | Teaching with the Library

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When I was conducting research for the Library of Congress primary source set "Civil War Photographs: New Technologies and New Uses," I learned way more about photographic technologies that were used before the Civil War than I could fit into the brief teacher's guide.

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The history of the first usage colour photography dates back to the early 1800s, when photographers resulted to hand colouring their images. However, a new theory arrose in 1861 called the "Three Colour Process." This process, invented by James Clerk Maxwell, utilises a mixture of red, green, and blue light to create the colours on an image. He created three lantern slides of tartan ribbon through red, green, and blue filters. He projected the colours through seperate lanterns on a screen and the colours superimposed together to create a full colour image.

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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James Clerk Maxwell was the first person to demonstrate the theory of colour photography in the 1860s. The first processes for colour photography was in 1890s. Although in 1860s, Maxwell produced colour by mixing red, green and blue light and this was called additive colour process.

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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The date of the development of colour photography has been hotly contested, with American Baptist pastor Levi Hill claiming to have developed a technique as early as 1851.  His technique, which used glass filters covered in coloured granules of potato starch, laid the groundwork for later inventions like the Autochrome.  Today, colour photography is so popular that it is difficult to imagine the art form existing without it.

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"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways." - Oscar Wilde

─── by Josh Bright, December 20, 2019

Since the inception of the medium, photographers have yearned to colorize their monochrome images, with the hand painting of printed photographs a widely used method during the 19th century.

The invention of color photography has been a much-debated topic, with Levi Hill, an American Baptist Pastor, claiming to have invented a method as early as 1851.

Others consider the depiction of a tartan ribbon taken some ten years later, to be the prototype. Captured by Thomas Sutton (the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera) he used an additive-color method invented by Scottish mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, whilst it was also around this time that inventor Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron was formulating a similar technique, based on the three color-theory which remains at the heart of printing today.

His method involved the glass filters coated in dyed grains of potato starch, and would form the foundations for subsequent developments, including the Autochrome , unveiled in 1907 by French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the inventors of the Cinématographe. The Autochrome process allowed for the capture of full color images with a realism that surpassed that of its predecessors, and it quickly became the dominant form of color photography. However, it was slow and cumbersome, requiring lengthy exposures which made the capture of moving images impossible

In 1936, Kodak revolutionized color photography with the release of their now legendary Kodachrome. A color-reversal film, it allowed for the capture of highly detailed imagery in full, expressive, chromaticity, making it extremely popular amongst commercial photographers in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, purveyors of more 'serious' styles, such as photojournalism, would largely continue to reject the allure of color imagery, regarding it as ostentatious, lacking in authenticity, and as a hindrance in their ongoing battle for their medium to be considered a genuine art form.

One exception was Austrian Ernst Haas , who, though not always recognized as such, was at the forefront of the early color movement and helped set the foundation for those who followed. Initially working exclusively in black and white, his foray into chromatic imagery began with the purchase of his first Leica, shortly after his inauguration into the Magnum Agency in 1949.

A multi-talented photographer, his work traversed both commercial (he was the first to photograph the 'Malboro Man') and photojournalism, though it is in his street photography where his use of color is most profound. Images of a Magic City, a series of color photos of New York, is an excellent example of his virtuosity. His use of unusual angles, slow-shutter speed, and reflections, give a partially abstract, sepia washed portrait of the city which would later become his home, and reflect Haas' free-spirited personality, whilst also displaying the artistic capabilities of the medium.

Saul Leiter , a contemporary of Haas, was another important early colorist, his portrayals of the streets surrounding his Manhattan home during the 50s and 60s, are truly extraordinary, and exemplify the artistic approach for which he later became renowned.

He possessed a painter's eye for color, and, like Haas, flirted with the abstract, using angles, compression, and often, shooting through windows whose surfaces were invariably glazed by steam, rain, or reflections. However, in contrast to the dynamism inherent in Haas' New York, Leiter sought out rare moments of serenity, an approach which mirrored his own reticence, though it would be decades before he would garner the recognition he so thoroughly deserved.

It is William Eggleston , who is widely regarded as the most important figure in color photography. Deemed the father of what is now known as the American color movement , his contributions to the acceptance of the style cannot be overstated, though, without his lesser-known friend and contemporary William Christenberry, the story may have been vastly different.

From the mid-1950s, Christenberry used his Kodak Brownie box camera to capture vernacular, and often haunting images of the landscapes and dilapidated structures of his home state of Alabama, with consideration for form and color informed by his multidisciplinary background.

He met fellow southerner Eggleston in the early 1960s and the pair quickly became close friends. At the time, Eggleston was working exclusively in black and white, inspired by the great humanists Robert Frank and Henri Cartier Bresson, as well as the vernacular, depression-era images of Walker Evans. But, by the mid-1960s, and due largely to Christenberry's influence, he began experimenting with color, a decision which would change the medium forever.

His home state of Tennessee (where he remains to this day) was, almost exclusively his focus, though, in spite of his obvious connection to the area, his approach deliberately avoided narrative.

William Eggleston possessed the extraordinary ability to transform the seemingly mundane: an empty table in a diner; a rusty bicycle discarded on a sidewalk; into enchanting and, at times surreal tinctured snapshots of rapidly modernising suburban life in the deep south.

In the early 70s, he began experimenting with dye-transfer printing, a process that afforded the user control over the luminosity of color. This allowed Eggleston to enhance the already saturated tones which pervaded his images, thus making them even more striking; his 1973 depiction of a lone lightbulb set against a blood-red ceiling was his first creation using the process, and is undoubtedly one of his most iconic, permeating with a palpable sense of foreboding that epitomizes his anomalous talent.

Simultaneously a group of free-thinking photographers was themselves exploring color, and though perhaps they were both influenced and emboldened by Eggleston, they were key figures in the color movement in their own right.

Stephen Shore is a notable example, his portrayals of ordinary life in 70s America captured the zeitgeist of the period. Likewise Joel Meyrowtiz, who captured the exquisite and ever-changing complexion of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in a series of portraits which were released in the photobook Cape Light in 1979, now regarded as one of the most influential of the twentieth century.

Another key figure of the American color movement was Helen Levitt : her candid depictions of 1970s New York, capture the intricacies of daily life and display an understanding of color to rival that of her more famous male contemporaries.

By the turn of the 1980s the dominance of monochrome had waned, and a new wave of influential color photographers emerged, notably Joel Sternfeld and Martin Parr.

Today the dominance of color photography is such that it is hard to envisage the medium without it. Its undeniable power is perhaps articulated most effectively by one of its earliest champions, Ernst Haas:
"Color is joy. One does not think of joy. One is carried by it".
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A brief History of Color Photography | The Independent Photographer

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Today, the dominance of color photography is such that it is hard to envisage the medium without it. One of its earliest champions, Ernst Haas said: "Color is joy. One does not think of joy. One is carried by it".

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In accordance with the concept that James Clerk Maxwell had proven in the 1860s, the 1890s saw the very first evolution of colour in photographs. They generated colour by combining red, green, and blue,  mainly all primary colours.

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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Edwin H. Land, the creator and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, created the initial instant camera as a pastime during World War II. The expansion of the American economy following the war made it possible for new sectors to prosper. In this list was the instant photography sector.

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The inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, developed the first instant camera as a hobby during World War II. After the war, the growth of the American economy made it possible for new industries to flourish. One of these industries was instant photography.

Polaroid photography focused on minimizing the time between taking the photograph and viewing the image. However, the first Polaroid camera, which debuted in 1948, still relied on the photographer to time the development of the film, pull out the print to burst a pod of developing chemicals, and peel away the top film. These first film prints were in sepia-tone, followed by black-and-white prints in 1950. The Polaroid company actually published a magazine advertisement for their black-and-white film before it was available, and their employees worked quickly to meet public demand.

As instant camera technology progressed, it became possible for the prints to develop within a minute before the eyes of the user (oftentimes, people would wave Polaroids in the air to encourage faster image development). After the popular black-and-white prints came the peel-apart color prints in 1963, and non-peel-apart color prints followed in 1972. By 1977, the height of its popularity, Polaroid held two-thirds of the instant camera market, despite competition from Kodak.

Around 1979, the sales of instant cameras began to decrease, as video cameras and 35-millimeter cameras became smaller and cheaper. Ultimately, Polaroid's innovations in instant photography created a public desire which would lead to their own demise at the hands of an even more instant medium - digital photography.

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The inventor and founder of the Polaroid Corporation, Edwin H. Land, developed the first instant camera as a hobby during World War II. After the war, the growth of the American economy made it possible for new industries to flourish. One of these industries was instant photography.

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The development of photography with cameras as we know it is frequently credited to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre. The former initially played about with silver halide and chloride photography, but was unable to figure out how to stop the images from turning dark when exposed to light. In modern day photography, a lot of images taken are snapshots; Photos are not as thought out. Snapchat, instagram and other social media apps are mass contributors to snapshot photography

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From its invention to its current omnipresence, photography has captivated us. It shows us things that otherwise would have remained unseen, in an entirely unique way. Stunning wall art by masters of the form like Man Ray and Edward Steichen, have become classics in the history of photography.

"One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing."
MoMA Curator- John Szarkowski

But when was photography invented? And by whom? Join us, as we take a look at the history of photography, from the early days of silver chloride-coated paper to today's world of digital photography and video photography. Find a curated selection of masterpieces in the LUMAS collection. Take a journey through the timeline of photography, discover famous photographers, and find your personal favorite pieces!

Contents - The History of Photography

The Camera Obscura and the Origin of Photography

When was photography invented?

The photography timeline extends back further than you might assume. In the 4th Century BC, Aristotle described the principles of the camera obscura, which entails projecting an image through a small hole. Through a camera obscura's pinhole, the image of the world is reversed or upside-down. While our notion of a camera has evolved dramatically, the "camera obscura" is considered to be the ancient building block upon which all further revolutionary developments and inventions in the field of photography were built. It defines the timeline of photographic history as we know it.

Who started photography?

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre are often considered the inventors of photography with cameras, as we now know it. The former started out experimenting with silver chloride and silver halide photography, but could not figure out how to prevent them from darkening when exposed to light.

In 1826, Niépce succeeded in taking the first true camera photograph. He used a sheet of pewter coated with bitumen, which required an exposure time of at least 8 hours! The subject of this photograph hit close to home for Niépce; the view from his workroom in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. The Niépce Heliograph is considered as the earliest known photograph in the history of photography, achieved with the aid of the camera obscura.

Painter Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was so excited about this achievement that he decided to partner with Niépce. Daguerre continued to develop, refine and tinker with the process by using silver-plated copper sheets and mercury vapor. As he continued to develop this process, Daguerre was able to vastly reduce the exposure time.

* In 1839, with an exposure time of just a few seconds, the daguerreotype became a means of using photography commercially for portraits. This has proven to be a critical juncture in the history of photography, greatly contributing to the popular acceptance of cameras and the success of the medium.

Just a few years later, William Henry Fox Talbot came up with the calotype process. This was the first process that let photographers create a negative from which multiple prints could be made.

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer introduced the collodion wet plate process, which produced a negative image on a transparent glass plate. Although it was surpassed by the gelatin dry plate process in the late 1800s, the collodion process was used for tintype portraits and in the printing industry well into the 1900s.

Photography Then and Now: Selfies and "Sex Sells"

These days, we think of the camera as an artist's tool, similar to a painter's brush. But before photography became its own art form, painting was the dominant medium in the art world. In the 1800s and in early 1900s, artists regarded photographers as inferior competition. Traditionally, people would have their portraits made by painters, who started to fear for their livelihood due to the rise of photography. Regardless, artists soon began to integrate the camera and photography into their repertoire.

The first "selfie" ever was taken in 1839 by American lamp-maker and photography enthusiast, Robert Cornelius, using the daguerreotype process. Business-minded photographers immediately recognized the commercial value of easily reproducible images.

With their erotic nude photographs in the 1850s, Alexis Gouin and Bruno Braquehais produced the predecessors to the classic pin-up photograph. They sold well, which should come as no surprise - "sex sells" was every bit as accurate then as it is now. These days, nude photography is still part of many photographer's portfolios, although few are able to walk the narrow line between tastefully aesthetic erotic images and gratuity.

The History and Development of Photography Timeline

35mm Cameras, Color Film, and Polaroid: Milestones in the History of Photography

After their invention, it took a long time for photographs and cameras to develop into what we have come to know today. This required more revolutionary ideas and exciting reinventions, which we can now look back on as milestones in the history of photography.

The film roll: In 1889, George Eastman created the roll of film, which made it possible to shoot multiple pictures one after the other. He released it through his company, Kodak. It was an immediate breakthrough in the practical application of photography. It made snapshots possible, as images no longer needed to be immediately and individually processed. In the same year, Thomas Edison cut it down the middle and added perforated edges, establishing the 35mm format that became so prevalent later.

The 35mm camera: The first Leica camera was developed by Oskar Barnack. Introduced in 1925, the Leica prototype used a small-format, 35mm film. In comparison with the bulky box cameras previously in use, the compact Leica camera was a highly modern improvement.

Color photos: In 1936, photographic technology took an exciting step forward with advances in color film. Kodak released Kodachrome, a film with multiple layers for developing in color.

Polaroid Pictures: Around that time, the first instant camera was also invented. The aesthetic is as popular as ever, enthusiastically coopted by photo services such as Instagram. The Polaroid camera introduced by Edwin H. Land in 1848 was capable of producing a fully developed photo shortly after taking it.

The Digital Camera: While the concept of digital cameras has existed since the 1960s, the Eastman Kodak camera designed by Steven Sasson in 1975 is generally considered to be the first self-contained digital camera. Much like photography with film, advances in digital technology have led to explosive growth in the medium's popularity.

Classics from the History of Photography: Heinrich Heidersberger and Alfred Eisenstaedt

Over the years, photographers and artists experimented with the possibilities afforded them by new technologies and camera innovations to create fascinating and enduring works that have gone down in photographic history.

Dress of Light: Heinrich Heidersberger

In his 1940s series "Dress of Light", photographer Heinrich Heidersberger created some of the world's most revolutionary images. He shot these iconic black-and-white images for Henri Nannen's newly founded Stern magazine. It caused an uproar in prude post-war Germany. Today, the pictures are rightly regarded photo art classics, globally respected for their innovative technical execution and aesthetics. The idea for these photographs was as simple as it was ingenious: Heidersberger fashioned a cooking pot into a "light gun" to "clothe" naked female bodies with patterns of stripes and dots made entirely of light and shadow. The images were a sensation.

In this way, he combined nude photography with experimental photography in a way that had never been seen before. He depicted unclothed women with his camera in such a way that they do not seem naked. Although the nude female form is at the center of these experimental photos, it mainly serves as a canvas on which a game of light and shadow plays out.

Photographs of Everyday Existence

Photography confronts us with stories and aspects of life that we might otherwise never notice. This has long been the case! While early pair of daguerreotypes paved the way for the genre of street photography, probably the most famous proponent of "slice of life" photography was Alfred Eisenstaedt. He never committed to specific photographic subjects, instead using his camera to capture historical figures and unknown characters going along with their daily lives. An impressive example of the latter is his pictures of workers in a spaghetti factory. Nothing in these images is staged or specially lit. It is the individual circumstances that gives his pictures their vitality - pictures that tell a story of their own. They bring us close to the three Neapolitan boys in the Italian factory and show us spaghetti hung out to dry like laundry.

Documenting History: Photographer- Will McBride

Lenses, f-stops and film speeds are not the only factors involved in making great pictures. The location and the right light are every bit as important. But the most important is the exact instant when the photographer presses the shutter. With a talent for sensing that exact split-second, photographer Will McBride came to photograph political heavyweights including John F. Kennedy and Willy Brandt, documenting defining moments in world history.

The road to digital photography

Photography in the mid-20th Century

In the early days of photography, advancements in technology began to make photographic apparatuses easier to use. By the 1950s, they had developed into the comfortable-to-use devices we now today.

In 1956, Agfa released the first camera with aperture priority, meaning photographers no longer needed to set the exposure time themselves.

A few years later, in 1963, Canon introduced its first camera prototype with autofocus, a development making snapshots much easier for the everyday photographer.

Rollei unveiled the first fully automatic camera about 10 years later. Aperture, shutter speed, focus - photographers no longer needed to set these themselves to create a usable image.

Digitalization and Image Editing in the History of Photography

With the digital revolution at the end of the 20th century, once again, the world experienced photography in a new light. Photos no longer needed to be produced on analog mediums - they could now be saved and edited digitally. This simplified the editing process tremendously.

Digitalization brought unimaginable possibilities in photographic post-processing. Artists put the technology to the widest variety of creative uses. Pep Ventosa, for example, digitally layers countless individual images. Sabine Wild is master of intricate line-based editing, and Isabelle Menin uses computers to assemble photographs into floral compositions. All three are evidence of the medium's sheer boundless potential.

The History of Photography: Short and Sweet

Since Nièpce and Daguerre introduced photography in 1839, the medium developed very quickly. A look back at how photography developed shows the different ways artists are able to use the medium, from the first nude images to slice of life photography, classic portraits and fashion photography. Currently, with all of the possibilities afforded us by modern digital photography and image editing, we are at a high point for the medium.

Do you want to purchase classic photographic works in wall-ready art? In the LUMAS collection, you will find an expertly curated selection of works in the most successful medium of all time. Get swept away by the latest creations from these artists and photographers! Explore the fascinating world of photography with LUMAS and start your own art collection with a piece of photographic history.

The History of Photography Timeline

4th Century BC

Aristotle describes the camera obscura

1826

Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce takes the first preserved camera photograph

1839

Daguerre and Niépce present the daguerreotype

ca. 1841

William Henry Fox Talbot develops the negative-positive process

1851

Frederick Scott Archer introduces the collodion process

1889

George Eastman presents the film strip (Kodak)

1925

Leica releases the first small-format camera with 35mm film

1936

Invention of color film (Kodak: Kodachrome, Agfa: Agfacolor)

1948

The first Polaroid camera delivers instant images using quick development process

1956

The first aperture priority camera hits the market (Agfa Automatic 66)

1963

Canon presents the first camera with autofocus

1974

Rollei produces the first fully-automatic camera

End of the 1900s

Transition from analog to digital photography

Discover Classic Photographs in the LUMAS Collection

Secure your favourite artwork now!

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The History of Photography | LUMAS Photo Art

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From its invention to its current omnipresence, photography has captivated us. It shows us things that otherwise would have remained unseen, in an entirely unique way. Stunning wall art by masters of the form like Man Ray and Edward Steichen, have become classics in the history of photography.

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Joseph Nicéphore Niépce .
Although Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is frequently credited with creating the initial photographic camera in 1816, the camera's development depended on centuries' worth of involvement.

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When Was The Camera Invented? Everything You Need To Know - NFI

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Nowadays, having a great camera on your smartphone and being able to “catch the experience” at all times is regarded as entirely usual, but this was not the case ten years ago.

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The camera obscura, an early version of the modern camera, was initially a room and subsequently evolved into a portable box with a small opening on one side. Through a lens inserted into the entrance, light reflected by natural objects enters the box and casts an image onto the surface opposite it.

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Washington, DC-The camera obscura (Latin for "dark room") is an optical device that creates an image by focusing rays of light onto a screen or sheet of paper. Its benefits for artists were noted by the Venetian nobleman Daniele Barbaro in 1568: "There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colors and shadows and motion, the clouds, the water twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady, you can trace the whole perspective with a pen."

A forerunner of the modern camera, the camera obscura consisted first of a room, then later of a portable box with a small opening in one side. Light reflected by objects in the natural world enters the box through a lens set into the opening and projects an image onto the opposite surface. The image, like one formed on the retina of the eye, is upside down and reversed. In the camera obscuras included in the exhibition, an angled mirror inside the box reflects the image right side up (though still reversed) onto a glass plate on top of the box. A piece of paper placed over the glass allows the projected image to be traced. Other models of the camera obscura varied in size and complexity.
View Painting and the Camera Obscura
Originally developed as a scientific instrument, the camera obscura appealed to artists who used it as an aid to drawing outdoors. While the optical principles behind the camera obscura had been known since antiquity, portable devices similar to the ones exhibited nearby were first available toward the end of the 16th century. Previous models would have been too unwieldy to be of practical use for the artist. The camera obscura would have helped artists render the correct perspective of views seen from eye level. Francesco Guardi was praised for his success in using the device to artistic advantage. Canaletto apparently used one as well. In his drawing View of Santa Maria Formosa toward the Right Side of the Square, the sheet of paper was not large enough to include the top of the bell tower, which floats to the right. If the top were superimposed onto the tower, it would fit precisely, suggesting that the artist simply moved the paper to catch the image projected from the lens of a camera obscura.
Camera Obscura Demonstration
The exhibition includes three modern camera obscuras that are similar to the historical models on view. A mirror inside each camera reflects the image of the East Building atrium onto the glass plate on top of the box. As with all camera obscuras of this kind, the image is upright but reversed.

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Washington, DC-The camera obscura (Latin for "dark room") is an optical device that creates an image by focusing rays of light onto a screen or sheet of paper.

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The 1890s saw the development of the first colour photography techniques. They produced colour by combining red, green, and blue light in accordance with the principle that James Clerk Maxwell had proven in the 1860s. These methods are referred to as "additive" colour processes.

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A short history of colour photography | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very first experiments with hand-colouring to the mass production of commercially viable colour film.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that saw a change from traditional photography to a more direct method of taking pictures, emphasising and exploiting the usage of the camera itself rather than just using it as a tool to take pictures.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that marked the shift from traditional pictorialist photography to a more direct way of capturing photos, exploiting, and emphasizing the use of and nature of the camera instead of using it as a tool to capture images.

You can find more about other types of photography in a previous article here.

Modern Photography: The History

Modern photography started in the 1900s and lasted until the 1960s, but the influence of its proponents remains to this day.

This period began with a gradual departure from the principles and limitations that traditional art imposed on photography, such as the taking of photos that resembled painting subjects and the use of soft, almost painterly focus.

While these photos were produced through manipulation of the photographs themselves, this new movement started exploring the photographic results of direct manipulation of the camera, using it as a tool to capture lines, shapes, light and shadow, textures, and subjects as they appeared in front of the lens.

Due to this shift in how cameras were being used, modern photography also explored new areas not covered by traditional photography such as social documentation. Straight Photography, an offshoot of Modern photography focused on capturing truthful records of life as seen by the photographer.

Early modern photographers took to street photography while still keeping true to aesthetic principles that ruled other forms of art like patterns and form, framing, and juxtaposition of subjects in their surroundings to create a statement.

Modern Photography Characteristics

Images also emphasized sharp focus and detail. Straight photography laid the foundations for other innovations in photography such as photojournalism, documentary photography, street photography, and snapshot photography.

Modern photography also gave birth to movements like Constructivism. It was promoted by photographers who believed that modern photography should help construct and not merely document the real world.

These photographs were noted for their precision and geometric simplicity which were the result fo a focus on photography as a technical exercise and the photographer as a technician.

Fashion photography also flourished during this time, with a focus not only on the wearer but also on the garment. Fashion photography grew fast through the 20s and 30s led by magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Photojournalism also developed during this period, driven by war photographers and the influence of magazines like Life. Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson were well-known proponents.

Another Shift

Modern photography underwent another major shift with the move from analog to digital which started in the 80s with the invention of the first digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop.

Aside from the expansion of the photographer's ability to capture more photos, the digital medium also allowed more freedom in manipulating photos during post-processing.

While this ability led to discussions on the repercussions of the truthfulness of photography it also led to more creative approaches taking advantage of the ability to change and transform images such as digital collages double prints and alteration.

The shift to digital photography also naturally led to the proliferation of photo taking and picture sharing and the ability of almost anyone to capture, edit, and share photos using mobile devices.

Important Modern Photographers

Well-known proponents of modern photography include Alfred Steiglitz, the foremost promoter of modern photography and straight photography, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.

Tina Modotti was born in Italy. She moved to the United States at a young age. In San Francisco, she worked as a model and as an actress in theatre. Tia Modotti later moved to Mexico with her partner Edward Weston who influenced her photography. Focusing on social documentary and mixing politics and art, she collaborated with artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. With them, she produced her most relevant body of work. Fo

Alfred Stieglitz believed that photography was an art form. However, he also figured in the Photo-Secession movement or the gradual move away from pictorialist images to images that were more real and faithful representations of the image in front of the lens.
Ansel Adams and Edward Weston founded the f/64 group in the 30s, focusing on modern photography of the American West.

Paul Strand was a proponent of modern, straight, and documentary photography and used large-format cameras to take pictures. He influenced the founding of the f/64 group and pushed the development of straight photography to documentary photography. Later works touched on the use o photography for social and political purposes.

Robert Capa was a war photographer best known for redefining war photojournalism. He offered a closer perspective of war because he was embedded in the trenches in World War II and earlier wars.

Henri Cartier-Bresson popularized candid photography and the use of a 35 mm film. He was one of the founders of Magnum Photos along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, among others. He is known for viewing photography as the act of capturing the decisive moment. Cartier- Bresson's influence on street, documentary, and photojournalistic photography remains to this day.

Read about more modern photography artists here.

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Modern photography is a period in photography that marked the shift from traditional pictorialist photography to a more direct way of capturing photos, exploiting, and emphasizing the use of and nature of the camera instead of using it as a tool to capture images.

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The first digital camera was invented by Steven J. Sasson in 1975, while he was working for Eastman Kodak. He ran into problems while making the prototypes in 1978, but even after receiving a patent for the camera it was never put into production. The company Kodak said they didn't see a market for the camera, but this did not stop Steven from continuing to build and work on his idea.

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In the past two weeks, you've probably shared at least one embarrassing photo with family or friends. The process, from taking the photo to sharing it, was practically instantaneous. Yet only 20 years ago, you would have had to load and unload film in your camera, drop the film off for processing, and then wait days before you'd know if you even had any images worth sharing.

Digital cameras have been around a lot longer than you might think, however. Invented in 1975 at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., the first digital camera displayed photos on its screen.

The Kodak digital camera has been commemorated as an IEEE Milestone. The dedication ceremony is scheduled for 26 April at the Kodak Center in Rochester. Registration is open; guests can attend in person or virtually.

"This was more than just a camera," IEEE Member Steven J. Sasson, inventor of the device, told The New York Times in 2015. "It was a photographic system to demonstrate the idea of an all-electronic camera that didn't use any consumables in the capturing and display of still photographic images."

Sasson says he never anticipated how the imaging of everything would become so ubiquitous.

"Photos have become the universal form of casual conversation," he said in a 2018 interview with The Institute. "And cameras are present in almost every type of environment, including in our own homes."
COMPLETING A DIFFICULT TASK
Eastman Kodak wanted to find a way to digitize images using a charged coupled device-specifically Fairchild Semiconductor 's 100-by-100-pixel CCD. The company assigned the job to Sasson in 1974, when he joined Kodak as an electronics engineer working in the apparatus division's research lab.

CCDs, which were invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs, consist of a sensor that converts an incoming two-dimensional light pattern into an electrical signal that in turn becomes an image. In the case of Fairchild's CCD, the image would be a square: 100 by 100 pixels.

Although the CCDs could capture an image, they couldn't store it. So Sasson built a CCD into a camera with RAM to capture image data, which was then transferred to a cassette tape. In a 2016 interview with DIY Photography, he said cassettes were the only permanent form of "digital storage" available to him at the time. He designed it so each tape would store 30 images.

To build his digital camera, Sasson scavenged a lens and an exposure mechanism from a Kodak XL55 movie camera. They served as his camera's optics and were enclosed in a blue, rectangular box. The box also had a switch on the side that turned the device on and off and served as the camera's shutter-release button. The blue box sat atop a layer of a half dozen circuit boards and 16 AA batteries. Enclosed in an open steel frame, all of the parts could be seen. The frame also could unfold to make it easier to modify the camera. A portable Memodyne cassette recorder that was attached to the side of the frame held the tape. The camera weighed 3.6 kilograms and was about the size of a toaster.

The photographer flipped the switch once to turn on the camera and flipped it a second time to take a photo. The CCD would capture the image, which would then run through a Motorola analog-to-digital converter and be stored temporarily in a DRAM array of a dozen 4,096-bit chips. The image was then transferred to the cassette.

Sasson and his colleagues invented a device to take the information stored on the tape and turn it into digital images. This playback unit converted the data to a standard NTSC signal so the images could be displayed on a TV screen.

After a year of working on the camera, Sasson took his first photo in December 1975. It was of a Kodak lab technician, Joy Marshall.

"It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape," Sasson said in the 2015 Times article. "I'd pop the cassette tape out, hand it to my assistant, and he would put it in our playback unit. About 30 seconds later, up popped the 100-pixel-by-100-pixel black-and-white image."

But when Sasson displayed the photo on the lab's computer, the image's flaws were apparent. The camera could render shades that were clearly dark or light, things in between appeared as static, according to a 2020 IEEE Spectrum article about digital cameras. Therefore, Marshall's face was not visible in the photograph.

Sasson fixed those problems and was granted a U.S. patent for the camera in 1978, but it was never put into production. Even after a few demonstrations of how the camera worked, Kodak executives said they didn't see a market for it. Sasson wasn't allowed to publicly talk about the camera or show his prototype to anyone outside of Kodak, according to an article on the camera onThe Vintage News.

That didn't deter Sasson, who continued to build more cameras for Kodak. In 1994 he built one of the first commercially available digital cameras-the AP NC2000-in collaboration with Nikon.

Today Sasson's original digital camera is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C.

Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Rochester (N.Y.) Section sponsored the nomination for the digital camera. Its Milestone plaque, which is to be displayed in the lobby of the Kodak Center, reads:
A self-contained portable digital camera was invented at an Eastman Kodak Company laboratory. It used movie camera optics, a charge-coupled device as an electronic light sensor, a temporary buffer of random-access memory, and image storage on a digital cassette. Subsequent commercial digital cameras using flash memory storage revolutionized how images are captured, processed, and shared, creating opportunities in commerce, education, and global communications.

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The First Digital Camera Was the Size of a Toaster

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In the past two weeks, you've probably shared at least one embarrassing photo with family or friends. The process, from taking the photo to sharing it, was practically instantaneous. Yet only 20 years ago, you would have had to load and unload film in your camera, drop the film off for processing, and then wait days before you'd know if you even had any images worth sharing.

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Philippe Kahn invented the first camera phone solution to rapidly exchange photos on public networks on June 11th, 1997. When Kahn's daughter was born, he jerry-rigged a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent live photographs, which served as the inspiration for this creation.

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On June 11th, 1997, Philippe Kahn created the first camera phone solution to share pictures instantly on public networks. The impetus for this invention was the birth of Kahn's daughter, when he jerry-rigged a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent photos in real time.

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Philippe Kahn invented the first method for sharing photos quickly over public networks on June 11th, 1997. This idea first came to Kahn when he improvised a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent real-time photographs of the birth of his daughter. Kahn's first smartphone shot was chosen in Time Magazine's 2016 list of the 100 most important images ever.

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On June 11th, 1997, Philippe Kahn created the first camera phone solution to share pictures instantly on public networks. The impetus for this invention was the birth of Kahn's daughter, when he jerry-rigged a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent photos in real time.

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The first portable camera was first invented by Johann Zahn but it wasn't that successful. The first camera was invented by Nicephore Niepce in 1816. He did many experiments but couldn't make any changes permanent until he met with his old friend, Louis Daguerre.

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The First Camera Ever Made: A History of Cameras

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The history of cameras is not defined by slow-moving evolution. Rather, it was a series of world-changing discoveries and inventions followed by the rest of the world catching up. The first camera to take a permanent photograph was invented a hundred years before the portable camera was available to…

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Steven Sasson, an engineer for Eastman Kodak, created the first real digital still camera in 1975. Using a movie camera lens, a few Motorola components, 16 batteries, and some newly developed Fairchild CCD electronic sensors, he created a prototype (US patent 4,131,919).

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The camera in your pocket is pretty amazing. Today's smartphone cameras feel like they're a million miles away from earlier photography tech, but digital cameras had to start somewhere.

Back in the 20th century when cameras needed film, digital camera technology began as a sat-nav for astronauts. Since then, Kodak, Apple and many others have played important roles in developing today's pocket-sized marvels. Let's dive into digital camera history to mark the milestone devices and the groundbreaking tech.

The beginnings

The history of the digital camera started in 1961 with Eugene F. Lally of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he wasn't working on artificial gravity, he was thinking about how astronauts could figure out their position in space by using a mosaic photosensor to take pictures of the planets and stars.

Lally actually figured out how to solve red eye in photos, but unfortunately his theory of digital photography was still way ahead of the existing technology. It was the same story 10 years later when Texas Instruments employee Willis Adcock came up with a proposal for a filmless camera ( US patent 4,057,830). It wasn't until 15 years later that the digital camera became a reality.

The first digital camera

The first actual digital still camera was developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He built a prototype ( US patent 4,131,919) from a movie camera lens, a handful of Motorola parts, 16 batteries and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors.

The resulting camera, pictured in 2007 on its first trip to Europe, was the size of a printer and weighed nearly 4 kilograms. It captured black-and-white images on a digital cassette tape, and Sasson and his colleagues also had to invent a special screen just to look at them.

Today's Apple iPhone 12 lineup has 12-megapixel cameras. That's 12 million pixels in an image. Kodak's prototype had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel. It also took 23 seconds to snap the first digital photograph. Talk about shutter lag!

Some say Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough, as it chose to continue to focus on photographic film. So the next step in the process would come from elsewhere.

The end of film?

The charged-couple device (CCD), invented in 1969, was the breakthrough that allowed digital photography to take off. A CCD is a light sensor that sits behind the lens and captures the image, essentially taking the place of the film in the camera. The first cameras to use CCD sensors were specialist industry models made by Fairchild in the 1970s.

By the 1980s, handheld cameras began to ditch film. This began in 1981 when Sony demonstrated a prototype Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera) model. However, it wasn't strictly a digital camera. Technically, the Mavica was a television camera that took still frames. These analog electronic cameras were precursors to digital snappers in that they recorded images on to electronic media, but they were still technically recording analog data.

Running off AA batteries, the Mavica stored pictures on two-inch floppy disks called Mavipaks holding up to 50 color photos for playback on a television or monitor. CCD size was 570x490 pixels on a 10x12mm chip. The light sensitivity of the sensor was ISO 200, and the shutter speed was fixed at 1/60 second.

Canon launched the first analog electronic camera to actually go on sale, the RC-701, in 1986. That pro model was followed by a consumer model, the RC-250 Xapshot, in 1988. The Xapshot was called Ion in Europe or Q-Pic in Japan. It cost $499 in the US, but consumers had to haul out another $999 on a battery, computer interface card with software, and floppy disks.

These kinds of cameras never really took off, however, due to poor image quality and prohibitive cost. Their ability to transmit images meant they were mainly used by newspapers to cover events such as the 1984 Olympics, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991.

The coming of true digital

The first true digital camera that actually worked was built in 1981. The University of Calgary Canada ASI Science Team built the Fairchild All-Sky camera to photograph auroras in the sky.

The All-Sky Camera used more of those 100x100-pixel Fairchild CCDs, which had been around since 1973. What made the All-Sky Camera truly digital was that it recorded digital data rather than analog. Meanwhile, in October 1981 the digital revolution rolled on with the release of the world's first consumer compact disc player, the Sony CDP-101.

Colani's concepts: Almost the future of cameras

In 1983, Canon commissioned Luigi Colani to envision the future of camera design. The outspoken designer believed that an egg is the highest form of packaging and employed his "no straight lines in the universe" philosophy to create these innovative concepts: the Hy-Pro, an SLR design with an LCD viewfinder; a novice camera named (rather tactlessly) the Lady; the Super C Bio with power zoom and built-in flash; and the underwater Frog.

He also designed the HOMIC, or the Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera. This was a spaceship-esque concept for a still video camera recording to solid-state memory. Unusually, the lens and viewfinder were on the same axis, while the flash fired through the objective lens. The HOMIC was exhibited at 1984's Photokina exhibition but never went on sale.

Digital hits the shops

The first genuinely handheld digital camera should have been the Fuji DS-1P in 1988. It recorded images as computerized files on a 16MB SRAM internal memory card jointly developed with Toshiba, but the DS-1P never actually made it to shops.

The first digital camera to actually go on sale in the US was the 1990 Dycam Model 1. Also marketed as the Logitech Fotoman, this camera used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally and connected directly to a PC for download -- in other words, just like the cameras we later became familiar with.

Digital develops

JPEG and MPEG standards were created for digital image and audio files in 1988. Digital Darkroom became the first image-manipulation program for the Macintosh computer in 1988, and Adobe PhotoShop 1.0 arrived in 1990.

Mosaic, the first web browser that let people view photographs over the web, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992. That year also saw the Kodak DCS 200 debut with a built-in hard drive. It was based on the Nikon N8008s and came in five combinations of black-and-white or color, with and without hard drive. Resolution was 1.54 million pixels, roughly four times the resolution of still-video cameras.

Apple gets in on the action: The QuickTake

You'd have to live under a rock to not know that Apple makes phones, but did you know it also had a crack at the digital camera market? The Apple QuickTake 100 launched in 1994 and was the first color digital camera you could buy for less than $1,000.

It packed a 640x480-pixel CCD and could stash up to eight 640x480 images in the internal memory. Despite the Apple logo, it was actually manufactured by Kodak. The follow-up QuickTake 200 was built by Fujifilm.

Connected cameras and CompactFlash

Epson launched the first "photo quality" desktop inkjet printer in 1994. Later that year, the Olympus Deltis VC-1100 became the first digital camera that could send photos. You had to plug it into a modem, but it could transmit photos down a phone line -- even a cellphone. It took about six minutes to transmit an image. Image resolution was 768x576 pixels, the shutter speed could be set between 1/8 and 1/1000 second, and it included a color LCD viewfinder.

SmartMedia card and CompactFlash memory cards also arrived in 1994. The first camera to use CompactFlash was the Kodak DC-25 in 1996.

The shape of things to come

The familiar shape of modern compact digital cameras emerged when the Casio QV-10 added an LCD screen on the back in 1995. The screen measured 46mm (1.8 inches) from corner to corner.

The QV-10 also had a pivoting lens. Photos were captured by a 1/5-inch 460x280-pixel CCD and stored to a semiconductor memory, which held up to 96 color still images. Other now-familiar features included close-up macro shooting, auto exposure and a self timer. It cost $1,000.

In 1995, Logitech debuted the VideoMan, its first webcam that plugged into a personal computer.

The digital age!

By the mid-1990s the familiar digital camera shape was established that would last for the next decade or more. In 1995, the Ricoh RDC-1 was the first digital still camera to also shoot movie footage and sound. It had a 64mm (2.5-inch) color LCD screen, and the f/2.8 aperture had a 3x optical zoom. Those remained the baseline specs for compacts for years, but at least the price came down over time. In contrast, the original RDC-1 set you back a hefty $1,500.

The now-familiar compact shape continued to emerge with the Canon PowerShot 600 in 1996. It had a 1/3-inch, 832x608-pixel CCD, built-in flash, auto white balance and an optical viewfinder as well as an LCD display. It was the first consumer model that could write images to a hard disk drive and could store up to 176MB. That cost $949.

Although compacts were sometimes released in weird and wonderful shapes -- such as the Pentax EI-C90, which split into two sections -- the basic form factor remained. By the 2010s, a compact camera was roughly the same size as the tape cassette that Steve Sasson's 1970s prototype needed just to save a single grainy image.

Professional-style SLR cameras also made the transition to digital. The DSLR cameras could swap lenses with their film ancestors, while enjoying the benefits of high-capacity digital memory and a handy screen on the back. The traditional DSLR design, saddled with film-era mechanical complexity, is now slowly being replaced by mirrorless cameras from Sony, Canon, Nikon and the smaller Micro Four Thirds alliance from Olympus and Panasonic.

The camera phone

The big digital revolution was, of course, the camera phone. The Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 in 1999 and Samsung SCH-V200 in 2000 were the first camera phones. A few months later the Sharp Electronics J-SH04 J-Phone was the first that didn't have to be plugged into a computer. It could just send photos, making it hugely popular in Japan and Korea. By 2003, camera phone sales overtook digital cameras.

In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and the smartphone age truly began. The cameras built into phones quickly improved, but a number of factors combined to transform everyone into a photographer: Phone memories got bigger so you could take more pictures; CCD sensors were replaced by CMOS chips that use less power; 3G, 4G and 5G made it possible to share your photos instantly; and photography sites like Flickr soon gave way to social networks like Facebook and Instagram as a place to share your shots.

In 2012, Nokia made a 41-megapixel smartphone, the Nokia 808 PureView. Feature films have been shot on iPhones, and lightweight consumer drones have taken digital photography to the skies. Today's best camera phones routinely come with two, three or four cameras to capture even better images. Smartphones' computer power also unleashed computational photography, processing technology that vaults over the limits of lenses and image sensors. And the latest buzzword is " pixel binning," used in regard to the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G for its huge 108-megapixel cameras.

Fortunately, we can expect the advancements to keep coming, and the day will come when today's camera phones look like relics too.

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History of digital cameras: From '70s prototypes to iPhone and Galaxy's everyday wonders

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The camera in your pocket is pretty amazing. Today's smartphone cameras feel like they're a million miles away from earlier photography tech, but digital cameras had to start somewhere. Back in the 20th century when cameras needed film, digital camera technology began as a sat-nav for astronauts.

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The first roll film was brought out by George Eastman in 1888. He was responsible for the invention of flexible film and along with that the kodak camera. It was simple and easy to use but different as it had a slot for the film to go into and no view price. A 35mm strip of film was regarded as small and grainier than the other wider strips of film but ended up giving a new way of taking photos due to its compact form and easy to carry style.

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The SLR camera took decades to be fully functional but the first one was made by Fritz Kricheldorff, a photographer from germany. He created it to include a folding mechanism and he was the first person to make the SLR camera with this technique.  The very first person to make an SLR camera was made by a company known as Ihagee but the original designer of it was Karl Nüchterlein. It was made in 1936 in Dresden, Germany and was an instant sensation among the people there.

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The development of the single lens reflex camera (SLR) that we all know and love today took over 320 years to complete. During this time, the camera continued to advance technologically and its operation was made more and more user-friendly. Many personalities were behind the development of the SLR. The SLR is a camera that has a foldable mirror etween the lens and the image plane. Before pressing the shutter release, the image is first reversely mirrored onto a focusing screen, which normally lies horizontally.

In the fifth part of our "History of Photography" series, you'll learn more about the development and implementation of the single lens reflex camera.

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The development of the single lens reflex camera (SLR) that we all know and love today took over 320 years to complete. During this time, the camera continued to advance technologically and its operation was made more and more user-friendly. Many personalities were behind the development of the SLR.

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The first photograph ever made was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in his family's home in the country. This was in 1826 and also using the “camera obscura”. The first ever portable camera was invented by Johann Zahn in 1965 but it took one hundred and thirty years for the first image to be produced.

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In most of human history, there were two ways to capture the world around you. You could describe it verbally or in writing. You could also draw or paint the scene if you knew how.

Neither of the two solutions was particularly trustworthy. It is easy for words to be distorted, and drawings take time and are highly dependent on the artist's skill. It is inevitable that details will be missed, lost, or warped. A way to accurately capture the world around us was needed.

It took centuries for such a technique to be discovered. Philosophers, alchemists, businessmen, spies, and fraudsters were all involved in the journey. Around 150 years ago, mankind succeeded in drawing with light.

The technology that resulted, photography, is almost miraculous. The extent to which it has dominated modern society cannot be overstated. We barely spare a moment to consider how it came to be and take it almost for granted. However, studying the history of photography is vital if you wish to fully understand and master photography.

In its relatively short history, photography has come a long way. From a simple box that took blurry photos nearly 200 years ago to today's high-tech minicomputers in DSLRs and smartphones.

It is possible to go into great detail about the history of photography. Let's look at some of the highlights and major developments of this scientific art form.

Hundreds of years of advancements in chemistry and optics led to the invention of the camera obscura, which enabled the first photograph to be taken. That photograph was taken in 1826 by French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, at his family's country home, Le Gras. By exposing a bitumen-coated plate in a camera obscura for several hours on his windowsill, Niépce created a photograph showing a courtyard and outbuildings.
1826
Nicéphore Niépce produces the first permanent photograph of a natural scene. Judean bitumen is used for its photosensitivity.
1839
William Henry Fox Talbot presents to the Royal Society of London a paper on photogenic drawing, a permanent camera obscura image made with photosensitive silver salts.
1851
In 1851-1854, ambrotypes are introduced in Europe and the U.S. and are used in the mid 1850s. In the same way that daguerreotypes are carried in plastic cases, wet collodion images are made by blackening the back of the glass plate. In the next 25 years, wet collodion negatives and positive paper prints will dominate photography.
1861
A projected color photographic image is demonstrated by James Clerk Maxwell in London, using three different color filters. Celluloid-like cellulose is produced by Alexander Parkes.
1873
The name "celluloid" is trademarked in the United States and Great Britain by John Wesley Hyatt.
1878
Among numerous English photographers, Charles Bennett improves gelatin dry plate photography by increasing the photosensitivity of the silver-salted gelatin emulsion (thus reducing the exposure time). Eastman reads the report in "British Journal of Photography."
1887
In Newark, New Jersey, the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin invents a method for making transparent, flexible film and applies for a patent.
1888
A roll-holder breast camera, commonly called the Kodak camera, is introduced by Eastman, which is easier to use and mass-produce than its earlier detective camera. It costs $25 at retail.
1895
The x-ray photograph is invented by Wilhelm Roentgen of Germany on November 8. The Lumière brothers of France exhibit a cinema projector.
1922
In Rochester, New York, the Eastman Theater opens on September 4.
1924
In an important step towards the invention of television, AT&T sends photographs by wire.
1930
Photographers now have reliable photoflash light bulbs at their disposal.
1931
Photographers can acquire motions of infinitesimally short duration with the stroboscope, a precisely timed flash developed by Harold Edgerton.
1935
Kodak employees Leopold Damrosch Mannes and Leopold Godowsky introduce the Kodachrome process of color photography.
1937
Xerography, or simply photocopying, is invented by Chester Carlson, who invents "electron photography."
1954
Tri-X film is introduced by Eastman Kodak.
1960
A new underwater camera developed by EG&G is being used by the US Navy.
1963
The instant color film is introduced by Polaroid.
1968
The Earth is photographed from the moon. In terms of environmental photography, Earthrise is considered one of the most influential images.
1973
With the SX-70 camera, Polaroid introduces one-step instant photography.
1977
Inventors George Eastman and Edwin Land are inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
1978
A point-and-shoot autofocus camera is introduced by Konica.
1980
The first consumer camcorder to capture moving images is demonstrated by Sony.
1984
The first digital electronic still camera is demonstrated by Canon.
1985
The digital imaging processor is introduced by Pixar.
1990
Kodak introduces Photo Compact Disc as a digital image storage medium.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the world's first photograph in 1826 with the first proper camera. Niépce took the photograph from the upstairs windows of his Burgundy estate. Bitumen of Judea (the naturally occurring Syrian asphalt) was coated onto a piece of glass or metal and then hardened in proportion to the amount of light hitting it. This process is known as heliography.

Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne in 1710 to address the concerns of English writers and booksellers. Copyright was established in 1710 through an act establishing authors' ownership. There is also a fixed period of protection of copyrighted works of fourteen years, renewable for fourteen more years if the author is still alive.

Congress in the United States claimed that protecting the rights of authors and inventors would support the continuous development of science and art. It was established in 1790, but it was not applicable in the U.S. Even in the 21st century, the U.S. still took a lot from the rich European cultural heritage for free, and weak copyright would make the art inexpensive. It did not take long for the situation to revert. America became a dominant cultural exporter at the end of the 20th century. There was an improvement in the situation for copyright owners. Authors and painters were not the only ones protected by copyright. A new kind of art was also protected: photography.

The conditions of copyrights evolved over the following years. Since the first extension of 28 years in 1831 with 14 years of renewal up to the life of the author plus 70 years in 1998, the duration of copyright protection has increased significantly. A significant moment in the history of Copyright was the Berne Convention (1886), which differed greatly from British and American laws. The Convention, on the other hand, focuses more on the rights of authors than on commerce.

Following the Berne Convention, the Berlin Act was signed by many European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom. Despite sending a delegation to observe the meetings, the United States did not sign the act. In 1976, the U.S. Copyright Act aligned U.S. Copyright terms with international practices. A photographer's work is protected by copyright from the moment it is created by this act. A bill adding the U.S. to the Berne Convention was signed by President Ronald Regan six years later, in 1988.

Invented in 1816 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the first device we recognize as a camera was created. Beaumont Newhall's "The History of Photography" documents the invention of the camera through letters to his brother.

Using his prototype, he took the first photograph ever in 1826, which captured the view from his home at Le Gras in France. Niépce spent at least eight hours creating the image.

Before modern cameras, ancient civilizations experimented with the camera obscura for centuries. Despite the fact that it is unknown who invented the camera obscura, the earliest known written record of this idea dates back to Han Chinese scholar Mozi (c. 470 to c. 391 BC).

According to Aristotle, sunlight traveling through leaf spaces creates the illusion of an overshadowed sun on the ground. Anthemius of Tralles, who used a camera obscura in his experiments in the 6th century, was aware of this phenomenon.

In his Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo da Vinci explains the camera obscura in great detail for the first time. Over the years, he sketched approximately 270 illustrations of camera obscura systems and related them to the human eye.

Designed by Johann Zahn in 1685, the first portable camera was the first of its kind. Approximately 130 years later, little progress was made in the development of the technology. Attempts to make cameras in between were mostly unsuccessful. First photographs were taken by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1814. Thus, Johann Zahn and Joseph Nicephore Niepce share credit for the invention of the first camera. Nicephore's photo was not permanent. The photograph was taken with a camera he built himself, using silver chloride-coated paper. On the paper, the regions not exposed to light became dark.

It was Louis Daguerre's obsession to find a simple way to create permanent images that led him to become an apprentice of architecture and theater design. As he continued to experiment with silver, he eventually discovered a relatively simple method that worked.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerreotype, an early form of photo camera. During light exposure, a thin film of silver iodide was applied to a plate. After that, the photographer would treat it with mercury vapor and heated saltwater in the darkness. As a result, any silver iodide that was not affected by the light would be removed, leaving behind a fixed image on the camera.

Despite being technically a mirror image of the world they captured, Daguerreotypes produced positive images, unlike Niepce's "negatives." Initially, daguerreotypes required long exposure times, but technological advances drastically decreased this time period within a few years, allowing the camera to even be used for family portraits.

In exchange for a life pension for Louis and his son, the French government purchased the rights to the daguerreotype design. In response, France presented the technology and the science behind it as a "free gift to the world". Soon, every wealthy household would take advantage of this new technology.

It was Frenchman Louis Daguerre who invented daguerreotypes in 1839, an early form of photography that used metal plates. Sir John Herschel, however, created a photographic negative using silver chloride on 9 September of the same year. He introduced the word "photography" into English.

One of the great Victorian polymaths, Herschel was capable of doing almost anything. Aside from his pioneering work in photography, he excelled in botany, math, chemistry, and astronomy, the family hobby. Sir William Herschel was his father, after whom the space observatory was named, which launched in 2009.

Photographing the skies with the glass-plate method was ideal (with a few modifications along the way). In fact, it was so successful that astronomers continued to use it into the 1990s.

Besides naming a bunch of planetary moons, Herschel also invented the "Cyanotype" method. Historically, cyan was used to make blueprints because it is the color used in printing.

Up until 1890, photography was largely a professional occupation. Therefore, the advent of consumer photography in the final decade of the 19th century can be considered a major step in the history of photography. Again, this development was driven by technological advancements: in the 1880s, George Eastman introduced a flexible roll film and the first Kodak camera. It offered 100 exposures, which had to be processed after returning the entire camera to Eastman. As a result, the pictures are of good quality and are shaped in circles. While professional photographers and artists explored this new tool from a creative standpoint, domestic and snapshot photography took off like a wildfire: anyone capable of pressing a button and turning a crank could now be a photographer, capturing whatever they viewed as interesting - at an affordable price.

A true revolution and irreversible process, the democratization of photography precipitated the omnipresence of images in the 21st century. A pioneer in this field was Oskar Barnack of E. Leitz invented a miniature camera with perforated strips of 35-mm film at the eve of World War I, later commercialized as the Leica (1924). Some distrusted this easy-to-use and compact device and deemed it unsuitable for serious photography, while others welcomed the opportunity to take photographs anywhere and anytime. The Leica quickly became the camera of choice for both professionals and amateurs.

While Eadweard Muybridge used 24 still cameras to capture a horse in motion in 1878, the Kinetograph camera, invented by W.K.L. in 1891 and patented in 1891, is considered by most film historians to be the oldest example of motion picture photography. The first motion picture camera contained in a single housing was invented by Dickson under Edison's guidance in the late 1880s. Lumiere, Pleograph, Aeroscope, and other early movie cameras followed the Kinetograph.

Most historians agree that Louis Le Prince's single-lens camera, made in 1888, created the first and oldest motion video. The video is a two-second silent film of people walking in a garden called "Roundhay Garden Scene.". It wasn't a blockbuster, but it was a major step forward for motion pictures.

Thomas Edison's employer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson invented the first movie camera in 1891 called the Kinetograph. Dickson's model was much more successful than Edison's video camera attempt at the same time.

Kazimierz Proszynski invented the Pleograph, a camera with a projector, in 1894. Aeroscope, the first compressed air camera, was also made by him. In WWI, news broadcasters had a much easier time shooting battles in the field thanks to the Aeroscope, the first hand-held camera.

As video cameras became available on a mass-market scale in the early 1900s, the film and theater industries boomed. In the past, these theater screenings were silent black-and-white films. The 1950s saw the addition of color to films along with the addition of sound as technology advanced.

During the late 1920s, "La Can-Can" became the first color movie. An artist creates a sculpture of a nude woman in the film. After spending some time with other women, he abandons them when he sees that his sculpture has come to life.

Color sequences are included in the film, but it is primarily in black and white. Parts of the black and white film were tinted to create the color sequences. Due to their inexperience, they weren't able to easily make the film's color consistent. It was long before dyes were used for color in films. Before the 1950s, this technique wasn't widely used for making films.

It was one of the first films to combine black and white and color in an artistic manner, making "La Can-Can" a landmark in movie history.

Gabriel Lippmann used his knowledge of physics in 1886 to create the first color photograph without the use of pigments or dyes. By using interference, Lippmann was able to explain the propagation of waves.

He showed his process along with color images of a parrot, a bowl of oranges, a group of flags, and a stained glass window by 1906. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery.

A pioneer in digital photography was Eugene F. Lally of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who in 1961 developed a process for digitizing light signals so astronauts could take better images and, therefore, better determine their location in space.

Film photography was used at this point, and for many decades to come, which was effective, but did not provide the immediate results Lally sought. In spite of the fact that the first filmless camera would not be invented for about 15 years more, Lally's early musings contributed to its invention, particularly the idea of using photo sensors instead of film.

Several other advancements in digital photography followed, some of them closely related to improving space photography, but before the invention of the digital camera.

Therefore, digital photography history cannot be pinpointed to a single year or invention. As a result, digital images are the culmination of the work of a variety of experts over many years. We can thank them for digital photography in its current form, even if most of us don't use it to position ourselves in space.
THE VEST POCKET AUTOGRAPHIC KODAK
Cameras of the 1920s were more advanced than their box-shaped, wooden predecessors. In an effort to make cameras more compact and travel-friendly, folding cameras were made with metal bodies and casings. Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak cameras went beyond folding mechanisms - they were much smaller, and could even fit in shirt pockets!
KODAK ANASTIGMAT F.7.7 AND AUTOGRAPHIC KODAK JR.
Anastigmat and Autographic were marketed as superior cameras with superior lenses. They were collaborations between professional lens makers and camera makers. This collaboration produced a quality result ready for aiming, shooting, and capturing, "superiorly."
CINE-KODAK
In the 20s, the motion picture era was still in its infancy, but camera manufacturers were still marketing cinema's growing popularity. The Cine-Kodak was the first 16mm camera created in 1923.
The Kodak Brownie
With the original Kodak Brownie, one of the most influential cameras ever made arrived in February 1900. This $1 USD camera was aimed at the masses (make the camera cheap and make your money on the film and processing). A simple box camera made of cardboard with a fixed focus meniscus lens.

It sold just over a quarter of a million units before being briefly updated as the Brownie No 1 in 1901. We also introduced medium format 120 film that year with the Brownie No. 2. A metal-bodied version of this camera is still working fine today after one of the longest production runs in history.
Camera Obscura: 5th century B.C.
Before the camera, there was the camera obscura. These devices consisted of darkened rooms or enclosed boxes with a tiny opening on one side, literally translated as "dark chambers.". Light passing through the "pinhole" projected a hazy picture of the outside world onto the walls or screens.
Photochemistry: 18th and 19th centuries
Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered in 1725 that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. In 1827, a French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura and a pewter plate coated with a light-sensitive material called Bitumen of Judea to capture and fix images. As the world's first photograph, his eight-hour exposure of the courtyard of his home is now considered to be the world's first.
Daguerreotype: 1837
Louis Daguerre, a French artist, and inventor who partnered with Niépce in the late 1820s, took photography to the next level. In 1837, Daguerre discovered that exposing iodized silver plates to light left behind a faint image that could be developed with mercury fumes. In addition to producing a sharper and more refined picture, the new technique also reduced the exposure time from several hours to about ten or twenty minutes.
Flexible Roll Film: 1884-1889
Film on rolls was introduced by George Eastman in the mid-1880s, making photography accessible to amateurs. Photographers could take multiple pictures in quick succession using a roll of film since it was more lightweight and resilient than heavy glass plates. Eastman used flexible film as the primary selling point of his first Kodak camera, a small, 100-exposure model that customers could use and then send back to the manufacturer for development. Its coated paper film produced fairly poor quality photographs, but Eastman marketed it to Victorian shutterbugs under the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest.". In the year following the introduction of celluloid, film would improve by leaps and bounds, and it would remain the standard method of photography for nearly a century until the advent of digital cameras.
Autochrome: 1907
The desire for color photography is practically as old as the medium itself, but it wasn't until 1907 that a viable method was developed. A year later, the Lumiere brothers began marketing the additive color process they called Autochrome. The Lumieres found the key to their invention in an unlikely place: the potato. They produced vivid, painterly images by adding tiny grains of dyed potato starch to a panchromatic emulsion. In 1935, Eastman Kodak Company's legendary Kodachrome film replaced Autochrome as the world's most popular color film technique.

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When was the camera invented? What was the first ever photo? Everything you wanted to know about the history of photography

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This fact-filled guide charts the history of photography and cameras, charting the invention of the camera, the first photo from the 1800s, and more...

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The first ever polaroid camera was invented by Edwin H. Land in 1948. It was called the model 95 and it sold out in Boston very quickly. In 1960, scientists were challenged to inventing instant colour photography, polaroid film in colour. It took 15 years to accomplish. Today, polaroid cameras are still used and its popularity is because there is no darkroom required and its very easy to use.

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Edwin Land and Instant Photography - American Chemical Society

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American Chemical Society: Chemistry for Life.

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The first portable camera was invented by Johann Zahn in 1685. Johann Zahn had the original idea for a portable camera first but nothing came of it for a long time. 130 years later Joseph Nicephore Niecpe was the first person to click a photograph. For this reason they were named co-creators of the camera. This website speaks about who created the camera, the history and what ancient Cameras looked like.

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Several people were instrumental in getting the camera to were it is today.

Cameras are important to people in many aspects. They are useful in capturing memories and moments which can be preserved either in the soft or hard copy. The development of camera from the age of a room-size box to what it is currently has taken a lot effort, trial and error, and has involved several people in the process.

History of the Invention of the Camera

It is quite interesting to analyze the progress the camera has made from when it was first invented to what it is today. The history behind the invention of the modern camera involves many people. Some of the people spent a decade attempting to come up with a camera. The inventors strived to develop the more superior camera than the cameras developed before. In 1021, Iraqi scientist and writer Ibn described a device which resembles a camera in many aspects, in his book titled "Book of Optics," marking the beginning of the thousand-mile journey involved in the development of the modern camera. In fact, the quality of cameras keeps improving day after day.

Who Invented the First Camera?

The first portable camera was designed by Johann Zahn in 1685. Not much progress was made in the development for up to approximately 130 years later. Most of the attempts to make cameras in between were futile. It was not until the year 1814 when Joseph Nicephore Niepce clicked the first photograph. The credit for the invention of the first camera is therefore co-shared between Johann Zahn and Joseph Nicephore Niepce. The photo taken by Nicephore was not permanent. It was taken using a camera he made on his own, on a paper coated with silver chloride. The regions that were not exposed to light on the paper became dark.

Louis Daguerre is given the credits for inventing the first ever practical photography in 1829. It took Daquerre over a decade attempting to come up with an effective method for the photography. All the progress Daquerre made was in partnership with the Nicephore. The ownership rights were sold to the French Government, which in turn took the responsibility of developing daquerreo type studios in different parts of the country. Alexander Walcott invented the first camera that produced photos that did not fade quickly.

From this point onwards, several people were involved in developing the methods and camera for superior quality images. The progress made involved invention of less blurred and colored photography, negatives, and smaller cameras.

What Did Ancient Cameras Look Like?

The pioneer cameras were huge in size. The first camera was in fact so huge it required several people to operate it. It was approximately the size of a room. It had space to accommodate a number of people on its inside. The big cameras were used up until the 1940s. Some of the cameras were able to take images, but could not save them. Thus, the photographer had to take up the task of manually tracing the images after snapping them. Initially, the cameras produced blurred images, which improved gradually. The first camera also took black and white images. In fact, it was until in the 1940s that the colored photography became common and commercialized.

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Cameras are important to people in many aspects. They are useful in capturing memories and moments which can be preserved either in the soft or hard copy. The development of camera from the age of a room-size box to what it is currently has taken a lot effort, trial and error, and has involved several people in the process.