About Photography and the Camera

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9 Jul 2023

A Brief History of Photography and the Camera

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The beginning of photography started almost 200 years ago when the first prototype of a camera was developed from a plain box that took blurry photos. Photographic history has advanced from crude photos to the high-tech mini computers found in today's DSLRs and smartphones. Here's a brief look at the fascinating history of photography, including highlights and major developments of this scientific art form.

The Earliest Concept of Photography

The basic concept of photography has been around since about the 5th century B.C.E. It wasn't until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura in the 11th century that the art was born.

Even then, the camera did not actually record images, it simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down, though they could be traced to create accurate drawings of real objects such as buildings.

The first camera obscura used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It was not until the 17th century , specifically in 1685, that German author Johann Zahn envisioned a prototype design for the camera obscura that was small enough to be portable.1

Developing the First Permanent Images

Photography, as we know it today, began in the early 1800s in France when inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created a prototype of a photographic camera in 1816.1 He used a portable camera obscura to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly. He is credited for taking the oldest surviving photograph, dated from 1826, of a view from the window of his house.2

Niépce's success led to several other experiments and photography progressed very rapidly. Daguerreotypes, emulsion plates, and wet plates were developed almost simultaneously in the mid- to late-1800s.

With each type of emulsion, photographers experimented with different chemicals and techniques. The following are the three that were instrumental in the development of modern photography.

The Daguerreotype

Niépce's experiment led to a collaboration with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. The result was the creation of the daguerreotype in 1837, defined as an image preserved as an object, or photograph, captured by an early photographic process.3 Here's roughly how this camera worked:

A copper plate was coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapor before it was exposed to light.To create the image on the plate, the early daguerreotypes had to be exposed to light for up to 15 minutes.The daguerreotype was very popular until it was replaced in the late 1850s by emulsion plates.

Emulsion Plates

Emulsion plates, or wet plates, were used between the 1830s and 1870s (before dry plates were invented in 1871).4 Wet plates were less expensive than daguerreotypes and required only two or three seconds of exposure time. This made them much more suited to portrait photographs, which was the most common use of photography at the time. Many photographs from the Civil War were produced on wet plates.

These wet plates used an emulsion process called the Collodion process, rather than a simple coating on the image plate. It was during this time that bellows were added to cameras to help with focusing.

Two common types of emulsion plates were the ambrotype and the tintype. Ambrotypes used a glass plate instead of the copper plate of the daguerreotypes. Tintypes used a tin plate. While these plates were much more sensitive to light, they had to be developed quickly. Photographers needed to have chemistry on hand and many traveled in wagons that doubled as a darkroom.

Dry Plates

By 1871, photography took another huge leap forward. Richard Maddox created dry plate photography, known as gelatin process photography, a technique nearly equal to wet plates in speed and quality but far more functional. In 1873, Charles Harper Bennett made even more improvements to the process for better photo quality.5

These dry plates could be stored rather than made as needed. This allowed photographers much more freedom when and where they could take photographs. The process also allowed for smaller cameras that could be hand-held and became the precursor to the film roll process. As exposure times decreased, the first camera with a mechanical shutter was developed.

The Dawn of Roll Film

Until entrepreneur George Eastman started the Eastman Dry Plate Company in 1881 (which was reincorporated as Eastman Kodak Company in 1892), photography was only for professionals and the very privileged.6

In 1888, Eastman debuted a flexible roll film that did not require constantly changing the solid plates. This allowed him to develop a self-contained box camera that held 100 film exposures. The camera had a small single lens with no focusing adjustment. The consumer would take pictures and send the camera back to the factory for the film to be developed and prints made, much like modern disposable cameras. The camera continued to evolve and innovate, eventually becoming more affordable and mass-produced in the 1940s, a few years after Eastman's death.

Fun Fact

In the 1930s, Henri Cartier-Bresson, known as the master of candid photography, used 35mm cameras to take spontaneous images of people and events, including European wartime efforts.7 Later in the decade, 1939 and beyond, photojournalists made photographic history by capturing images from World War II, all of which forever shaped the face of photography as a news and communications tool.8

Etienne Jeanneret / Getty Images

The Magic of Instant Images

The Polaroid camera, also known as Model 95, made its debut in 1948, created by inventor Edwin H. Land. The instant photograph became a huge hit thanks to a chemical process used to develop film inside the camera in less than a minute. Though the Polaroid camera was not cheap, the novelty remained popular from the 1960s to the 1970s.9

Though the Polaroid camera and film all but vanished due to problems including the rise of digital photography and the bankruptcy and sale of the Polaroid Corporation around 2008, it has miraculously made a comeback through the Impossible Project, also known as Polaroid Original and now just Polaroid, which purchased the last Polaroid film factory in 2018. The company's mission is to preserve vintage Polaroid cameras and its artform while introducing new generations of the camera.10

DAJ / Getty Images

Introduction of Advanced SLR Cameras

Although the SLR (single lens reflex) camera has its beginnings in Europe in the 1890s and into the 1940s (along the same time that color film was invented by Agfa), the technology didn't become truly viable until the 1950s. For the next 30 years, SLR-style cameras continually improved and remained the camera of choice.11

Fabiano Santos / EyeEm / Getty Images

Innovations in Smarter Cameras

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, quality "point-and-shoot" compact film-based cameras were introduced. These cameras controlled images with calculated shutter speed, aperture, and focus, leaving photographers free to concentrate on composition. The automatic cameras became immensely popular with casual photographers. Professionals and serious amateurs continued to work with SLR cameras which allowed them to make custom and manual adjustments for more image control.

Around the same period of 1975, Eastman Kodak developed the very first digital camera that was big, bulky, and purely experimental.1213 However, it wouldn't be until 1989 when Fujifilm released the FUJIX DS-1P, the first commercially available, fully digital camera (meaning, it had a memory storage card and not a detached hard drive).14

Stephen Chiang / Getty Images

Ushering in Digital Photography

In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous manufacturers began introducing consumer and professional digital cameras. In 1991, Kodak released the DCS 100, the first commercially available DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera.

In 1997, a new dad made headlines by rigging up a mobile phone to take a photo of his baby's birth.15 In 2000, Japanese phone manufacturers developed cell phones with camera capabilities and the concept quickly took root in the United States in the early 2000s. Since then, the quality of cameras in cell phones has increased exponentially.16

The history of photography is likely not over yet, but it is holding steady as basic point-and-shoot cameras take high-quality digital photos, most of us depend on smartphone cameras to document our everyday lives, and professional photographers continue to rely on DSLRs to take top-quality images.

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