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Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s Very Long Exposure
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s Very Long Exposure createsthe first perminitly fixed camera -
Louis Daguerre and the Daguerreotype
In 1829 French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre partnered with Niépce in an effort to reduce the excessive exposure time needed to render an image -
Negative/Positive
Three weeks after the Daguerreotype made its debut, British scientist Fox Talbot reported that he had devised a “photogenic drawing” process — which he had already been experimenting with for several years — based on the use of light sensitive paper as opposed to metal plates. Talbot would eventually — and accidentally — discover that a short exposure time and the right chemicals turned his paper into a negative that could be used to make multiple positive prints. Talbot called his process “calo -
Roger Fenton: War Photographer
Roger Fenton rose to fame in England during the “golden age” of photography in the 1850s. Originally recognized for his architecture and landscape photography, Fenton was dispatched to cover the Crimean War in 1855, thus becoming the world’s first war photographer. Because of the unwieldy nature of his equipment and its inherent technological limitations, Fenton was unable to photograph moving subjects and instead focused on posed portraits and landscapes. He chose not to photograph dead or inju -
Crossing the Niagara
On June 30, 1859, William England, chief photographer with the London Stereoscopic Company, gathered with 5000 other spectators to watch Jean Francois Gravelet (performing under the name Charles Blondin) attempt to cross from Canada to the United States by walking a tightrope suspended above the Niagara River. England captured Blondin’s successful 1100-foot (335-meter) trek across the river; his stereoscopic images were among the first to be licensed for international commercial use -
The Roll Standard
In 1889, a year after introducing a simplified camera suitable for the general public (the Kodak Number 1), George Eastman transparent roll film made of nitrocellulose. Later that year, Thomas Edison took Eastman’s 70mm Kodak film roll, slit it down the middle, and cut transport perforations down both sides. This 35mm format would become the international standard for motion picture cameras and, eventually, still cameras -
Stark Realism
Reinhold Thiele is often cited among the founders of photojournalism, having covered major events in Britain including the opening of the Tower Bridge and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1899, the London Daily Graphic commissioned Thiele to cover the Second Boer War. Many of the photographs made by Thiele were considered so graphic that the newspaper refused to run them -
35mm
German engineer Oskar Barnack had a problem: he was an avid amateur photographer who had become disillusioned by the weight of the photographic equipment of the time, an issue that became increasingly significant in light of Barnack’s failing health. His goal was to design a small, portable film camera. 35mm film was already in regular use for motion pictures; in 1913, Barnack developed the prototype of a camera designed to make use of 35mm film for the purpose of still photography. In 1925, the -
Instant Gratification
In 1947, American physicist Dr. Edwin Land invented a one-step process for developing and printing photos by applying the principle of diffusion transfer, which reproduces the image captured by the camera’s lens onto a photosensitive surface serving as both film and photo. 57 of Land’s cameras went on sale before Christmas 1948 and thus the Polaroid instant camera revolution was born, with Ansel Adams as one of Polaroid’s greatest proponents -
The Decisive Moment
Widely considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work revealed the lofty potential of street photography. In 1947, after escaping a German POW camp four years prior, Cartier-Bresson teamed up with four other photographers, including famed wartime photojournalist Robert Capa, to form Magnum Photos — one of the world’s premier photo agencies. His 1952 book The Decisive Moment is a powerful testament to “the photographer with a heart” and an amazing record of 20 -
Digitize Me
In 1974, Gareth Lloyd, a supervisor at Kodak, presented electrical engineer Steven Sasson with a question — he wanted to know whether a type of high speed semiconductor known as a charge-coupled device (CCD) could be used to fashion a camera image sensor. A year later, Sasson had invented a big blue contraption that could capture an image, convert that information into an electronic signal, then digitize the signal and store it in memory. This first digital camera, which weighed 8 pounds (3.6kg) -
The Death of Film?
Building upon Steven Sasson’s landmark invention of the digital still camera, Kodak released the first commercially available digital SLR in 1991. Known as the Kodak DCS-100 it was essentially a modified Nikon F3 body equipped with a 1.3 megapixel sensor and an external storage unit with a capacity of 200 MB, capable of storing 156 uncompressed images. The DCS-100 wasn’t an overwhelming commercial success; sporting a retail tag of $13,000USD, it sold 987 units. More significant, however, was tha
