The history of photography can actually be traced back to the 4th century BCE (sort of), when Aristotle described the camera obscura. The camera obscura projects an upside-down image through a small hole. However, there was no way to record the image other than manually drawing or painting it onto the surface where it was projected, but this lens-less box started people thinking about how to take a picture.
It wasn't until 1826, when Joseph Niépce took the first photograph with a camera he designed, that the era of photography truly began. The recording media he created was a pewter plate coated with bitumen, which required an exposure time of at least 8 hours. The subject of the photograph was the view from his workroom in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. Niépce called his process heliography, from the Greek helios meaning "drawing with the sun".
Niépce and Louis Daguerre are considered the inventors of photography with cameras. In 1837, they created the daguerreotype, which is defined as an image preserved as an object, or photograph, captured by an early photographic process in monochrome tones.
In the mid-1800s, photography emerged as a revolutionary medium that transformed how people documented and perceived the world. It offered an unprecedented ability to capture realistic images, quickly gaining popularity for portraiture among those who could afford it.
Photography also became a powerful tool for preserving history, with photographers such as Mathew Brady documenting events like the American Civil War and the expansion of railroads, offering visual records that complemented written accounts.
Additionally, it served scientific and exploratory purposes, aiding in fields like archaeology, astronomy, and botany by capturing detailed images of findings and landscapes. This period marked photography's transition from a novelty to a vital cultural and historical instrument.
The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, which was commercially introduced in 1907. It relied on a unique plate coated with a mosaic of microscopic grains of dyed potato starch in orange, green, and violet, which served as color filters. Beneath this layer was a layer of black-and-white photographic emulsion. When light passed through the dyed starch grains during exposure, it created a color image upon development. Known for its soft, painterly aesthetic and muted tones, the Autochrome process was popular among early 20th-century photographers seeking to explore color in their work. Although it was eventually supplanted by more advanced color photography methods, Autochrome plates remain celebrated for their delicate beauty and historical significance in the evolution of photographic technology.
In 1913, Oskar Barnack built the first 35mm film Leica prototypes. The Leica was the first practical 35 mm camera that used standard cinema 35 mm film. For the next few decades, a lot of advances in the quality and sensitivity of film stock were made, and cameras got better and more reliable, but little was changing in essence until the mid 70s when something truly and uniquely new was being introduced to the world of photography for the first time in 60 years.
In 1974, Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer at Eastman Kodak, built a prototype digital camera that could digitize, store, and play back images. The prototype was about the size of a toaster, weighed almost nine pounds, and could only capture black-and-white images onto a cassette tape. The first digital camera that actually worked remotely like a modern one was built in 1981.
Digital cameras started to become commercially available in the early 1990s, allowing people to take photos and print them at home without the need for a darkroom. Early digital cameras were bulky, had low resolution, and slow performance.
Over time, as technology advanced, digital cameras became smaller, faster, and able to produce higher quality images. In terms of features, early digital cameras had very basic functionality compared to today's cameras. And even though the technology has progressed enormously over the last 200 years, the basic principle of projecting light onto a recording medium has remained the same.
