THE FIRST PERMANENT IMAGES

Photography began in the late 1830s in France. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable camera to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly.

Although the first camera wasn’t created until the 19th century, the concept of photography has been around since about the 5th century B.C. It wasn’t until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura in the 11th century that the art was born. The camera obscura consisted of a tent with a pinhole which projected images onto the surface of the tent, upside down, they could be traced to create accurate drawings of real objects such as buildings.

Niépce’s success led to a number of other experiments and photography progressed rapidly. Three different techniques were quickly created known as, Daguerreotypes, Emulsion Plates and Dry Plates.

A daguerreotype consisted of a copper plate being exposed to iodine vapour, and then exposed to light for roughly 15 minutes. This was a very popular method until 1850 when it was replaced with emulsion plates. Emulsion plates, were less expensive than daguerreotypes and required only two or three seconds of exposure time. This made them more efficient for portrait photographs, which were the most common photographs in this time period.

Photography was only for professionals and the rich until George Eastman started a company called Kodak in the 1880s. They created an affordable portable camera in 1888 known as the Brownie, the creation of this camera made photography very popular around the world as it was now affordable for the average person, and very easy to use.

In the 1980s and 90s companies such as kodak started creating cameras that held photos digitally compared to film, this started what photography is today.

Comparing these two images you can see that photography has clearly come along way, just 139 years after the first photograph was taken, we managed to take a picture of Earth.