The History of Photography

Records of the camera obscura date back as far as 500 BCE where it is described in Chinese writings. However, there are theories to suggest the effect of a camera obscura inspired cave paintings long before this time. 

In 1027 AD in his Book of Optics, Alhazen, an Arab Physicist, described a camera obscura as a 'dark chamber' with light passing through small pinholes and the effects on the wall but it was not until the 17th century that the camera obscura became portable.

In 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulz discovered that Silver Nitrate changed colour when exposed to light which allowed the first photos to be taken and processed.
 
The first known photograph that did not fade quickly was taken by Joseph Niépce in 1827, with the technique which was later known as heliography. He used a camera obscura and exposed a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. The photo he took is shown to the right. This lead to collaborations with Louis Daguerre and they created the 'daguerreotype' which involved a copper plate being coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapour before being exposed to light for 15 minutes. 

In January 1839, photography became known publicly, with complete instructions being released in August of that year. 

In the late 1850s, Emulsion plates were introduced by Frederick Scott Archer which replaced daguerreotype as they were less expensive and only needed 2-3 seconds exposure time compared with the 15 minutes of the daguerreotype. 

Dry plates were introduced in the 1870s by Richard Maddox and could be stored instead of made to order like the previous wet emulsion plates. Shutters were first fitted to cameras in this period to reliably cap and uncap the lens for short amounts of time. 


In 1832, three years before Daguerre, Hércules Florence started studying ways of fixing camera obscura images and in 1833 he found silver nitrate on paper worked and so he is known as the inventor of photography in Brazil. On the left is an image of a photocopy made using Florence's technique.

William Fox Talbot invented the photographic process known as the calotype which involved paper coated in silver iodide. The process allowed negatives to be produced quickly which then could be turned into positives. One of the first examples is shown to the right. 

In 1888, John Carbutt made celluloid film from sheets of celluloid coated in photographic emulsion which allowed the advancement to motion picture. 

George Eastman, the founder of the Kodak company, patented the first roll of film and later the first camera designed as shown to the left. This helped popularise photography for the general public.

In 1963, the American company, Polaroid, introduced the first instant colour film from which the negative could be pulled from the positive on paper.

The Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera), released in 1981, was the first still video camera to be released. It allowed 50 still frames to be recorded onto a disk and then be viewed on a television. In 1997, the Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 was released which was the first digital camera from the Mavica series.

The first DSLR camera available was the Kodak DCS100 (Kodak Professional Digital Camera System) which had a digital image sensor mounted on a Nikon F3 body. Here it is shown attached to its digital storage unit. 

Sources:
http://www.kirriemuircameraobscura.com/history-camera-obscuras
https://www.thespruce.com/brief-history-of-photography-2688527
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9rcules_Florence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calotype
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carbutt
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9024539/Kodak-130-years-of-history.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica
http://www.nikonweb.com/dcs100/