The origin of photography

Answer 1

The first known photograph was taken in 1825 by "Niecphore Niepce." however the camera obscura and pinhole cameras were developed before that, they just had no way of recording the image that was produced.

Answer 2

Images made by exposing various salt compounds have been around a long time but there was not way to "fix" or make permanent the image until the 1820s.

If you've ever tanned you understand how exposure to light can cause a chemical reaction. This happens with a lot of different substances, so throughout history there was a search for a means of making these exposures permanent.

The first Photography cameras were pinholes, but the technology advanced quickly and lenses were soon added to better focus the light. The process of exposing a photo still took a long time (the first fixed photo taking around 12 hours) but over the past hundred + years film sensitivity has gotten much better. We now have very sensitive, low-light film that would blow the socks off of the photographers of yesteryear, who at the time of the US Civil War, judged exposure by how far down they'd smoked their cigars.

The forerunner of the cameras was the Camera Obscura. These were used to project a scene onto a surface for the purpose of tracing the image, which could then be painted or engraved. Some of the devices were large enough to walk into, in which case they were often used for projecting on to a large screen a scene being acted out.

Answer 3

In the early 1800's there was a Franch man called Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce, who was used to the process of heliography. With time he wanted to develop a way of imprinting what he saw on paper, so he first developed a process that wasn't reproductable. It was the positive right on paper, so he couldn't reproduce more than that one. It was the only proof he had. Then he got together with a man calleg Louis Jacques Daguerre, who helped him develop the process, in 1839. Daguerre and Nièpce developed the process into silver plates with Mercury vapors, which was very dangerous. Although, when Nièpce died, Daguerre patented the discovery only to his name, so his fame is not very pretty because of that. So that process was only known as the Daguerreotype. At the same time, in England - with no knowledge of what was going on in France already -, a man named William Henry Fox Talbot created a process he called Calotype. This process was introduced in 1841 using paper coated with silver iodide.

After that it was a matter of time until photography almost became a plague. It developed very quickly. Soon many people where claiming themselves as photographers or photography technicians. The apertures available in cameras started enlarging very much every year and instead of lasting hours or even minutes, it only lasted seconds of fractions of a second in less than 20 years.