When was photography created

In , he realised that applying wax to paper negatives made them more receptive to detail. This method, which provided more detailed images than the calotype but could be reproduced unlike the Daguerreotype, seemed to combine the best of both worlds. Like other monarchs, such as Queen Victoria , Louis-Napoleon quickly realised that photography provided the means to present himself and his family to his subjects as real human beings. But the new medium was not limited to the lucrative activity of portraiture.

Photographers were soon in demand for documenting all kinds of subjects for scientific purposes. The Crimean War of which the Russian Empire lost against an alliance between France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia was the first to be documented photographically.

Before the invention of photography, current events and news were reported principally via the written word or occasionally by engraved copies of drawings or paintings.

It was not until that a photograph of a current event — the barricade of the Rue Saint Maur June , part of the ongoing tensions following the Revolution and the declaration of the Second French Republic — was reproduced about two weeks after the event! After , magazines would explicitly mention when an engraving was made from a photograph, and, by implication, lend weight to the supposed authenticity of the scene represented.

The realism of photography adds a unique visual dimension to our understanding of the Second French Empire. Photographers had only minutes to coat a plate in flammable photo-sensitive chemicals, take the photo, and develop it. The search for a more accessible and convenient form of photography would continue for another 20 years, until the introduction of dry-plate photography.

In , a new technique using dry plates was invented by Richard Maddox. Dry plates did away with the finicky and often hazardous process of coating your own photographic plates, and it also gave photographers much more flexibility.

Unlike wet plates, unexposed dry plates could be stored until use, and exposed dry plates did not have to be rushed into development. This process was used and refined for several years until the invention of film. In the s, the Kodak company, started by George Eastman , developed flexible film. This led to the invention of the first film camera, known as the Kodak, that was capable of taking up to photos before the film needed to be changed.

It was a simple camera with one shutter speed and a fixed lens, but it made photography accessible to more people than ever before. In , Oskar Barnack created a prototype for a compact 35mm camera that would produce high-quality enlargements; in the design called the Leica was put into production.

Its popularity made 35mm film the top choice for high-end cameras. Film for handheld cameras was black and white until , when the Kodak company introduced color film. Over the years, color film was improved upon and became more affordable, and by the s color photography dominated the industry.

Black-and-white photos were then used mostly for photojournalism and fine-art photography. While cameras and film were readily available, the process of developing film and printing photos was still laborious. So inventors continued to work on making the development and printing process faster. These images were displayed in public shows and published in newspapers and magazines.

In the photography timeline, this helped photography gain a strong place in modern society. Could you even imagine the news now without any photos? Metal and glass plates were fragile, cumbersome and hard to work with, and somewhat costly for the average person. A more accessible method continued to be looked for by photographers. A combination of two technologies, silver halides and celluloid based emulsions continued getting improved upon. In , Henry Fox Talbot invented a viable method of spreading a gelatine emulsion on paper.

In , astronomer John Herschel came up with a way to fix the image recorded by silver halides. In , these two technologies were first manufactured together as a photographic film. This film could be produced in individual sheets or as a roll. George Eastman of Rochester, New York had an idea. Use this new roll film, build a simple, easy-to-use camera, and market it as a fun use product. In the history of photography, Eastman was a master of marketing photography to the masses. Eastman Kodak became a driving force in the worldwide boom of photography.

They introduced many different formats of films, both in rolls and sheets, as well as cameras for beginner, enthusiast, and professional photographers. Motion pictures, moving pictures, or movies are an entrenched part of the timeline of photography.

The question of how best to capture subjects in motion was first successfully answered by Eadweard Muybridge in response to settling a bet about horses hooves and galloping. The things that move technology! In short time, cameras and accompanying projects were invented to film continuous motion and display them by means of projecting onto a large screen.

Later innovations such as sound recording get added in as well in due course. One of the more common formats of roll film was format, also called 35mm. This format was used primarily for motion pictures, but it also started getting spooled into small cartridges for miniature still cameras, as they were called then. The movie cameras transported 35mm film through the cameras vertically, with an image frame of 18x24mm.

The camera took photos in black and white, weighed 8 pounds 3. Sasson built it using leftovers from the Kodak factory — and so began a new era in photography. But over time, digital cameras became more accessible to the masses. Digital cameras began entering the marketplace throughout the s and s.

They typically took the form of point-and-shoot cameras from computer makers and the bigger camera manufacturers. Fuji and Kodak joined forces with Canon and Nikon in to produce digital cameras geared towards professionals.

The four companies worked together until the start of the 21st century. Its creation marked the first time a major camera manufacturer designed and built a digital system camera, which was sold internationally at a reasonable price. Moving further along the digital camera timeline, one of the most interesting photographic developments in recent decades has been the advent of the smartphone.

The smartphone has revolutionised how we perceive photography and changed the industry forever. People can take and upload photographs in an instant and transfer their photographs to anywhere in the world. More of us consider ourselves competent photographers nowadays. This seismic change has inevitably been met with some cynicism among professional photographers.

You may have seen the viral post from wedding photographer Hannah Mbalenhle Stanley about the smartphone user who ruined what would have been a perfect shot. More generally speaking, many professional photographers argue that a smartphone is no match for a camera.

Still, full exhibitions of photographs taken on smartphones have appeared worldwide due to the high calibre of technology within such devices. We now have portable gadgets in our pockets that can snap and share stills in an instant and contain the most incredible technology.

With most professional cameras, you need to use a cable or SD card to upload photos or videos, but this isn't an issue if you have access to WiFi or Bluetooth.

Some models have already advanced with this setting, and although it exists in smartphones, it could be of more use within a professional camera. There are also reports of AI and AR technology shaping the editing process and new art styles coming to the fore, but the widespread enthusiasm for polaroid and vintage cameras remains. Quality, editing, speed — you name it. As history has shown us, we're guaranteed to have better gear than the generation before us in the coming years.

Now you understand the origins of photography and its remarkable development over the years, you might come to appreciate your camera that little bit more.