-
1825
Around 1825 Joseph Nicephore Niepce was looking out of his window about to make a heliograph. Mr Niepce is believed to have produced the oldest surviving photograph. He made a small piece of polished pewter which he coated with a solution of bitumen and lavender oil. The most interesting property of bitumen is that it is light sensitive -
1839
Robert Cornelius is an American who worked in metal polishing and silver plating. This man was interested in the Daguerreotype process and wanted to refine the technique using his knowledge of chemistry and metallurgical composition. Cornelius was standing outside his family's store and made the first ever selfie. Cornelius wrote 'the first light picture ever taken'. This photo would go down in history as the first time a person was intentionally imaged using light. -
1839
Joseph Nicephore Niepce partnered with an artist named Louis Daguerre but sadly Niepce passed away in 1833 an left all his notes for Daguerre to continue working on it. Daguerre’s process was the discovery of applying mercury fumes to the exposed silver plate he could actually make the “latent” image visible on the plate which reduced the long exposure times of previous methods. Exposures could now be measured in minutes instead of days. This process was called Daguerreotype -
1856
In 1856 there were two men named Hamilton Smith of America and William Kloen of Great Britain. These two men discovered the same invention at the same time. They created a type of printer that was called the tintype. The tintype process employed a thin ferrous plate that had been lacquered black. The lacquered piece of tin (iron) was then treated with either a wet or dry emulsion of silver halide and collodion emulsion -
1861
There was a man named James Clerk Maxwell who produced a paper on optical colour vision. Maxwell found that our eyes are sensitive to red, blue, and green light spectrums. The first known photograph using this invention was taken in 1861. The photo was made by stacking three black and white images which were exposed using red, green, and blue filters. The image could then be viewed in colour -
1925
In 1925 the most popular portable camera was the Kodak Box Brownie. This was a major event as cameras could now be hand-held and use ready-made gelatin dry plates to make detailed images with short exposure times. This was an absolute revolution in photography. -
1950
Edwin Land, this man is not very famous but his invention was the Polaroid. Mr Land believed that the idea of the three colour process was not very accurate. Instead, he proposed a “two-colour process” which stated that each cone cell within the eye did not have differentiated nerve endings which perceive red, blue, or green independently. -
1969
We are now in the world of digital. There were two men named Willard Boyle and George E. Smith who invented the charge-coupled device (CCD) in 1969. Digital cameras use a charged-coupled device, instead of film to convert light to an electronic file. The CCD has a layer composed of a photosensitive capacitor array which senses light of different intensities, therefore, transferring the relative data to the camera’s processor -
1999
Over the past ten years multiple portable, digital cameras have evolved from the Kodak DCS with a 1.3 megapixel image sensor, to the Minolta RD-175 with 1.75 megapixel sensor. Now in 1999, Nikon developed the first DSLR camera (Nikon D-1) which allowed photographers to use the same lenses from their film cameras on their new DSLR which hefted a 2.74 megapixel sensor -
2018
We now find ourselves here in the present with the ease by which photographs are now taken instantly with no more bulky camera obscuras, without plates, films or chemicals and with one easy press of a button. Today, quality cameras are easily accessible being in mobile devices. "Though the future is most definitely unknown, it is very possible that the biggest step forward for our art could come from the way we view our images instead of the way we make them"
