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The First Permanent Image
French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce uses a camera obscura to burn a permanent image of the countryside at his Le Gras, France, estate onto a chemical-coated pewter plate. -
The First Photo Of A Person
French painter and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre photographes a Paris street scene from his apartment window using a camera obscura and his newly invented daguerreotype process. -
The First Ariel Photo
Felix Tournachon, better known by the nom de plume Nadar, combines his interests; aeronautics, journalism, and photography, and becomes the first to capture an aerial photograph in a tethered balloon over Paris. -
The First Colour Photo
The enormously influential Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell creates a rudimentary color image by superimposing onto a single screen three black-and-white images each passed through three filters; red, green, and blue. -
The First Action Photo
English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, using new emulsions that allow nearly instantaneous photography, begins taking photograph sequences that capture animals and humans in motion. -
The First Underwater Colour Photo
Ichthyologist William Longley and National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin use an Autochrome camera and a raft full of explosive magnesium flash powder to illuminate the shallows of Florida's Dry Tortugas. -
The First Photo From Space
Researchers with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory strap a 35-millimeter camera to a German V-2 missile and launch it into space from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. -
The First Photo Of The Night Sky
National Geographic teams up with the California Institute of Technology for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a seven-year project to produce the first photographic map of the Northern Hemisphere's night sky. -
The First Magazine To Publish Everything In Colour
National Geographic teams up with the California Institute of Technology for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a seven-year project to produce the first photographic map of the Northern Hemisphere's night sky. -
The First Digital Still Camera
Kodak releases the first commercially available, professional digital camera in 1991. This device, extremely expensive and marketed to professional photographers, uses a Nikon F-3 camera body fitted with a digital sensor.
