The Fascinating History And Evolution Of Photography

Long before there was even primitive photography, people understood that there was a relationship between light and images. It's possible that you've personally experienced the physical mechanics behind early image capturing devices. Light coming through a window or partially drawn blinds can project an image from outside onto a wall, (per MIT).

As explained by Photography History Facts, the first recorded mention of this effect was by Mozi, a Chinese philosopher in the 5^th Century BC. About a hundred years later, Aristotle noted that a solar eclipse shining through the leaves of a tree projected an image of the eclipse on the ground.

Later, the same effect was used intentionally by way of a device called a camera obscura, Latin for "dark chamber," (per Britannica). A camera obscura is essentially a box with a pinhole or a lens on the outside. Light travels through the pinhole and hits the opposite wall where the image is displayed. However, because rays of light travel in a straight line, the image is reversed and turned upside down.

Early users of the camera obscura would place a piece of drawing paper on the wall receiving the image so that it could be traced. This was one of the earliest ways images could be captured on paper, though indirectly, and was a direct predecessor to the camera.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce spent much of his life experimenting with photographic processes. He was enamored with the idea of capturing the image displayed inside a camera obscura and experimented with many different chemical agents in his attempts to achieve a photograph.

In his first early experiments, he placed sheets of paper treated with silver salts inside a camera obscura. Like Schulz's photograms, they darkened where the light was present, creating a negative of the image outside. As explained by the Maison Nicéphore Niépce, he then got to work trying to create positive images using iron oxide and manganese black oxide, with some success. The major challenge was preventing the image from overexposing as soon as it was removed from the camera obscura. Images could be created but couldn't be fixed permanently.

Eventually, he moved away from treated photo paper and onto a polished pewter plate covered in bitumen of Judea, (per the Abby Newsletter). This combination worked but the exposure times were too long for capturing fleeting occurrences. To that end, Niépce set his camera sights on landscapes. He positioned his setup in the upper-story window of his house, looking out on the world, and left it there for eight hours. Washing away the remaining bitumen prevented any further exposure after being removed from the box and the image was fixed. Compared to today's standards it's a grainy and lifeless image, but given the context of the time, it's a masterpiece.

Those early photographs had a relatively narrow field of view, requiring photographers to select finite subjects like individuals or small groups, or else take their pictures from a considerable distance, but it wasn't long before that changed. Early panoramic photos were constructed by taking a series of daguerreotypes and placing them in sequence, (per the Library of Congress), but even when done successfully they rarely looked like a single image.

In 1859, Thomas Sutton, a photographer from Jersey invented what is considered to be the world's first wide angle lens, making early panoramic pictures possible, (per Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias).

The trick behind Sutton's novel camera was the design of both its body and the lens inside. As explained by Museums Victoria Collections, the wooden camera body had a curved back which held metal plates used to capture the exposures. The lens, positioned in front of the plate, was a hollow glass sphere which Sutton filled with distilled water.

The sphere captured light from a greater area and projected it onto the plate at the back. Metal plates were treated with sensitizing chemicals and exposed before the chemicals dried. The resulting images were a negative of their subject with a field of view between 120 and 140 degrees.

To this point, photography had succeeded in capturing brief moments in time. Despite the exposures sometimes taking several seconds, minutes, or even hours, the images obtained through these early methods appeared as discrete blips, captured in amber. The next step, of course, was to capture motion.

As explained by Smithsonian Magazine, the person perhaps most responsible for pushing the issue was Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University. Like Maxwell, Stanford didn't capture the resulting images himself, instead partnering with photographer Eadward Muybridge, and he did it to answer a nagging question. He wanted to know if all four of a horse's hooves left the ground at the same time when they run.

To pull it off, Muybridge devised a complex collection of twelve cameras, each of which were triggered by a tripwire. Stanford set his horse coursing down the racetrack, pulling a cart behind it. As the wheels of the cart rolled over each of the tripwires, an exposure was taken. In only a few seconds, Muybridge had collected twelve sequential images capturing the horse in motion.

Those frames, or copies of them, could then be played in sequence using a zoopraxiscope to create the first moving image.

As the technology and the community around it evolved, cameras continued getting smaller and easier to use. While the Kodak #1 introduced the first popular personal camera, Oskar Barnack wasn't satisfied with their size or function. To that end, he set about inventing his own camera.

As explained by the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, Barnack was interested in making smaller negatives which could then be enlarged to full-size finished images. By shrinking down the initial materials, cameras could become smaller and easier to use.

Barnack set his sights on 35mm movie stock as his film of choice because it was comparatively affordable and easy to get a hold of. In 1913 he succeeded in building his camera, what would come to be known as the Leica 1(A). However, it wasn't released to the public until 1925, (per the National Museum of American History).

Despite being nearly a hundred years having passed since its public introduction, it's easy to see the blueprint of modern cameras in the Leica. Its slim design and textured black finish wouldn't look out of place on today's store shelves.

The 35mm format was so successful it remains the standard for non-digital consumer cameras, even today.

In 1975, Steve Sasson, an engineer for Kodak, invented the first digital camera. As explained by Wired, His first prototype was nearly the size of an over the shoulder boombox and was cobbled together from parts cannibalized around the office. The lens, which was taken from a Super 8 movie camera, captured images which were then converted to an electrical signal and recorded on cassette tape.

The technology worked but there were some considerable downsides. Sasson's "filmless photography" machine took roughly 23 seconds to capture an image. The tape then had to be removed and put into a customer device which displayed the images on a television. By this point people had become accustomed to swift exposures but might have been willing to overlook the timeframe if it weren't for the poor image quality.

The black and white images were mediocre even by the standards of the time, coming in at .01 megapixels, (per Kodak). For comparison, the iPhone 13 Pro's camera takes photos at 12 megapixels, a full 1200 times the resolution, and it does so instantly. Sasson would have had to capture images nonstop for nearly eight hours to capture the same amount of data you get while taking a selfie. Despite all those challenges, digital photography was destined to catch on.

Prior to the emergence of camera phones, cell phones were actually mostly used as phones. They did include text messaging capabilities and rudimentary pixelated games, but the age of apps and internet connectivity hadn't yet turned cell phones into the all-purpose devices they are today. The addition of cameras into mobile phones was the beginning of that shift and it all started in June of 2000.

That year, Samsung released the SCH-V200 in South Korea. It included a .35-megapixel camera and enough storage to hold 20 photos. Getting the photos off the phone required connecting it to a computer, which may have made it less desirable, (per Digital Trends).

Later that year, Sharp released the first phone capable of taking pictures and sending them to someone else over the air. In 2002, camera phones finally made their way to the United States in the form of the Sanyo SCP-5300. Despite their inferior quality when compared with contemporary digital cameras, camera phone sales began outstripping that of digital cameras. By the end of 2003, roughly 84 million camera phones had been sold, making up approximately a sixth of all mobile phone sales, (per Financial Express).

From then on, an onboard camera became a pretty standard feature of cell phones. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a phone without one.