A Brief History Of The Development Of Photography

The Camera Obscura or pin-hole camera was known about in ancient times. It was first described in Chinese records by Mozi dating as far back as 470 BC. Aristotle in the fourth century BC also understood its principles.

Meaning 'darkened room' the Camera Obscura was originally a room completely sealed from light, except for a very small hole in one wall. An image of the outside world would be projected, upside down and reversed right-to-left, onto the opposite wall to the hole.

965-1038AD: An Arab scholar named Abu Ali Al-Hasan is the person credited with describing the first theory and scientific understanding of the camera obscura. He developed a camera obscura to illustrate how the eye processes an image. He is perhaps the founder of modern photographic understanding.

c1267: The work Abu Ali Al-Hasan influenced Roger Bacon who created convincing optical illusions using mirrors and the basic principles of the camera obscura. Bacon used a camera obscura to project an image of the sun. Throughout the middle ages Bacon's ideas were adapted for astronomical observations of the sun and the camera obscura became a popular tool for safely viewing eclipses.

1568: Daniello Barbaro fitted the camera obscura with a lens and a changeable opening to sharpen the image.

1600's: Up until this time camera obscuras always involved a room in a fixed building. Now the first portable versions in various forms including tents, sedan chairs, boxes and pocket models. Portable camera obscuras were used widely by artists as aids for sketching. For this purpose the most popular form was the reflex box camera obscura in which the lens formed an upright image on a sheet of translucent paper after reflection by an inclined mirror.

1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid and silver in a flask. He notices darkening on the side of the flask which is exposed to sunlight. Schulze accidental creates the first photo-sensitive compound.

1816: French inventor Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper.

1826: The first permanent photographic image is created by Niépce. He set up a camera obscura in the window of his upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras. The black-and-white exposure takes eight hours and fades significantly, but an image is still visible on the plate today.

1839: Sees the first photograph of a person. In early 1839, French painter and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre photographs a Paris street scene from his apartment window using a camera obscura and his newly invented daguerreotype process. The long exposure time (several minutes) means moving objects like pedestrians and carriages don't appear in the photo. But an unidentified man who stops for a shoeshine remains still long enough to unwittingly become the first person ever photographed.

1840: The first lens specifically for photographic purposes is designed by Petzval.

1847: The first photographs of war are created. Charles J. Betts follows the American Army to Veracruz, Mexico, Mexican-American War. He offers to photograph 'the dead and wounded' using the daguerreotype process. Other photoagraphers take photographs of troop movements and American officers.

1855-1856: However, it is not until the Crimean War that the first official war photographs are taken. The British government sends several photographers to document the war.

1855: Sees the beginning of stereoscopic or 3D photography where photography became able to recreate the illusion of depth.

1861: The first color photograph is produced by James Clerk Maxwell.

1878: The first action photographs are produced. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge begins taking photograph sequences of animals and humans in motion. Using 12 cameras, outfitted with a trip wire, he takes a series of photographs of a galloping horse. This helps settle a disagreement whether all four hooves leave the ground at any time during its gait - they do.

1888: First Kodak camera is created containing a 20-foot roll of paper - enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.

1889: An improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper is created.

1900: The Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.

1909: Sees the first photographs of the North Pole. On 6th April 1909 Robert E. Peary and his assistant, Matthew Henson, become the first people to reach and photograph the North Pole. It was a grueling 37-day journey by dogsled over 475 miles. The feat is immediately questioned by skeptics who say the round-trip could not have been completed so quickly. Nearly 100 years later, the the claim still remains in doubt.

1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, is established in Tokyo.

1924: Leitz markets the 'Leica', the first commercially available high quality 35mm camera.

1926: The first underwater color photograph is produced.

1932: The inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives are made in the same camera under different filters, is born.

1934: The Fuji photo film company is founded. By 1938 Fuji is making cameras and lenses in and film.

1936: Sees the development of Kodachrome, the first colour multi-layered color film, and the introduction of the Exakta camera pioneering the 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera.

1963: First color instant film is developed by Polaroid and the Instamatic is released by Kodak.

1983: Kodak introduces the disk camera using an 8x11mm frames.

1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system, the Maxxum 7000.

1991: The first digital still camera arrives. Kodak releases the first commercially available, professional digital camera. Extremely expensive and marketed to professional photographers it uses a Nikon F3 camera body fitted with a digital sensor. Over the next five years, several companies come out with more affordable models.

1991: The first digital SLR is launched, the Kodak DCS-100, a modified Nikon F3.

2000: The camera phone is introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone.

2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt

2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras.

2005: The Canon EOS 5D is launched. This is first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor.

2008: Has digital finally overtaken film? The UK Channel 5 programme 'The Gadget Show' ran a test to see which produced the better image - film or digital camera. In series 1 of the Gadget Show, a similar test was run and film outstripped digital. For this second test the cameras used were: film camera - 35mm f5, digital camera - a D700 digital with a full frame image sensor.

Both were set to ISO 400 and both used the same 35mm lens. Both shots were blown up to a size 17 metres from top to bottom. The digital prints were found to be of a superior quality with the film images having a green cast in black areas.

However, some questions have been asked concerning the test conditions. For example, what was the white balance settings with these being easier to change for digital. What was the type of film used, transparency or negative? The choice of ISO settings could be questioned (photographs shot in a studio using flash, yet at ISO 400 could be unfair to the film). Also there was insufficient information as to how the film image was enlarged - was it a straight enlargement or scanned and then digitally scaled up?

So perhaps digital photography has not quite overtaken film, but for the average consumer the modern digital camera, with all its advanced features, has come a long way from the camera obscura and certainly is the choice of convenience.