Taking a photograph has never been as easy as it is today. However, in the initial days of the camera, things looked a little different. It took professionals long hours to capture a single image, that appeared blurry and did not last very long. Our modern-day cameras are a result of several technical discoveries and contributions of many bright people over the past couple of centuries. Here is a brief history of the camera technology, since its inception.
Camera Obscura: In the 5th century A.D, philosophers and scholars used a device called Camera Obscura (Latin word for the term ‘dark chamber’), as a way to observe light. The device was a completely dark room with a small hole at one side of it, through which light entered inside and projected an inverse image on the viewing surface of the surrounding outside the room. By the late 17th and 18th century, the Camera Obscura was shrunk into the size of a small box, named a Pinhole Camera. It helped the artists trace over the projected image and duplicate it on a sheet of paper.
Heliography
With the help of Camera Obscura, a French inventor named Joseph Niepce created the first-ever photograph in 1816, by using a pewter plate coated with bitumen as the reflecting surface. The plate had to be exposed to light for almost 8-9 hours for the image to be created, however, it faded away after some time. This process came to be known as Heliography or sun-print.
Daguerreotype
After Niepce’s death, his partner Louis Daguerre continued with the experimentation of photographic plates, and in the year 1839 invented the first practical photographic process, named the Daguerreotype. The method involved exposing a light-sensitive metal sheet for almost half an hour to create a direct positive image, which could be made permanent by immersing the sheet into salt.
Calotype
In the year 1851, Fredrick Scott Archer developed a method called the Wet Collodion Process, or the Wet Plate Process. This procedure involved the use of a glass plate coated with collodion that had to be exposed to light for 2-3 seconds to create an instant negative image while the plate was still wet.
Gelatin Process
In 1871, Richard Maddox successfully created a dry plate negative. He used glass photographic plates and covered them with gelatin, which had to be dried before use. This removed a lot of inconveniences that were involved using wet plates, as they could now be stored, transported and were not required to be processed by the cameraman.
Film Photography
George Eastman invented the roll film camera in the year 1888 that made photography accessible to amateurs. Eastman used paper rolls coated with an emulsion that allowed photographers to take multiple pictures in quick succession. His company Eastman Kodak, founded around the same time, released a camera named Brownie under the price tag of just $1 that used photographic films, became a huge success. The users were required to click a button to take photos and then send the camera to the factory for processing of the films, hence, it was marketed under the tagline “You press the button, we do the rest”.
Instant Camera
In 1948, American Scientist, Edwin Land introduced the Polaroid Model 95, the first-ever commercially available instant camera that could print photos minutes after capturing the image. Instant cameras turned out to be very successful until the advent of digital technology.
SLR Camera
The first 35mm SLR camera (Kine Exakta) was made available in 1936, long after it was patented in the year 1861. This German camera was followed by several technical innovations that took place in Japan, the US, Sweden and Russia. The SLR allowed photographers to capture exactly what was visible through the lens. It works when light reflects from an object in-front and enters into the camera through an adjustable aperture that lets you control the amount of light that hits the film.
SLR cameras became widely popular in the 1970s, with Polaroid SX 70 being the first to introduce an autofocus technology, that made photography easier for regular people. The cameras were soon upgraded to digital in the late 80s, called DSLRs, which are still used even to this day.
Digital Camera
In 1957, a man named Russell Kirsch took the first black and white digital photograph of his son Walden. Later, in the year 1975, an engineer at Kodak named Steven Sasson developed the very first true digital camera. Over the next few decades, digital cameras continued to develop and evolve and were made commercially available in the early 1990s. Soon cameras were integrated into mobile phones, with Kyocera VP – 210 being the first camera phone available in the market. Today, almost every smartphone comes along with a camera as a mandatory feature and their popularity has led to a significant decrease in the sale of digital cameras over the past few years.
