THE CAMERA OBSCURA

The roots of photography extend back further than you might think. In the 4th Century BC, Aristotle made use of the principles of the camera obscura, in which an image is projected through a small hole.

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

The photo below titled ‘View from the window at Le Gras’ is thought to be one of the oldest surviving photos ever. It was taken by Nicéphore Niépce in his estate in France called Saint-Loup-de-Varennes somewhere between 1826 and 1827. Niépce captured the scene with a camera obscura projected onto a pewter plate thinly coated with  a naturally occurring asphalt before letting the photo sit for 8 hours to gather exposure.

INVENTION OF THE KODAK

The kodak camera was released in 1888 by George Eastman. George Eastman invented flexible roll film and in 1888 introduced the Kodak camera shown to use this film. It took 100-exposure rolls of film that gave circular images 2 5/8″ in diameter. In 1888 the original Kodak sold for $25 loaded with a roll of film and included a leather carrying case. The Original Kodak was fitted with a rotating barrel shutter unique to this model. The shutter was set by pulling up a string on top of the camera and operated by pushing a button on the side of the camera. After taking a photograph, a key on top of the camera was used to wind the film onto the next frame. After 100 pictures had been taken on the film strip, the camera would be returned to the Kodak factory for developing and printing at a cost of $10. Kodak advertisements from 1888 also state that any amateur could “finish his own pictures” and spare rolls of film were sold for $2.

INVENTION OF MOVING PICTURES

One of the biggest impacts photography has had was the invention of moving pictures. Photography became a part of public life in the mid-19th century, especially during the Civil War, when photographers documented American battlefields for the first time. Experimenting with ways to exhibit photographs, several inventors came up with a simple toy that made it possible for a series of pictures to be viewed in rapid succession, creating the illusion of motion. It was called a zoetrope. On October 19, 1878, Scientific American published a series of pictures showing a horse galloping, along with instructions to view them through the zoetrope.

The photos were called ‘The Horse in Motion’ and were taken by an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to settle a bet between California businessman Leland Stanford and his colleagues. Stanford contended that at some point in a horse’s stride, all four hooves were off the ground. He enlisted Muybridge to take photographs of the positions of a horse’s hooves in rapid succession. Muybridge’s 12 pictures showed that Stanford had won the bet.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Steven Sasson invented the digital camera at Kodak in 1975.It weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg) and had only 100 × 100 resolution. The image was recorded onto a cassette and this process took 23 seconds. His camera took images in black and white. As he set out on his design project, what he wanted for the future was a camera without mechanical moving parts (although his device did have moving parts, for example, the tape drive).  He built a prototype from a movie camera lens, a handful of Motorola parts, 16 batteries and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors. The resulting camera, pictured below in 2007, was the size of a printer and weighed nearly 4 kilograms.