The first photograph was made by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce after years of experimenting to produce a permanent image from a camera.
The first photograph was made by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce after years of experimenting to produce a permanent image from a camera.
Within a century, millions of people owned cameras.
The ancestor of the modern camera is the camera obscura, the earliest of which were small, dark rooms with a small hole to let in light.
The image of the scene outside the room would form on its back wall, upside down.
From the 16th century, artists used camera obscuras to help produce lifelike images that they would trace around. Portable versions were eventually made.
Niépce (1765–1833) wanted somehow to ‘fix’ the image the camera obscura produced and began trying out various chemicals to achieve it.
He succeeded with a petrochemical called ‘bitumen of Judea’, spread on to a pewter plate.
His earliest surviving photograph, on our spoof Sun front page (above right), needed an estimated eight-hour exposure to bright sunlight to produce.
Niépce called the process ‘heliography’, meaning ‘sun writing’.
From 1829, he worked with another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), to try to improve the technique.
The two experimented with other substances, including silver.
Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre continued the research.
By 1838, he had perfected the ‘daguerreotype’, an image formed on a silver-plated copper sheet.
Before a picture was taken, the silver surface was ‘sensitised’, by exposure to iodine vapour. This formed a light-sensitive compound called silver iodide.
After the picture was taken, the image was developed and then fixed using various chemicals. This was the first commercially available photographic technology.
Britain’s pioneer of photography was William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), who carried out his first experiments at the same time as Daguerre.
Like Daguerre’s process, Talbot’s ‘calotype’ system exploited the fact that compounds of silver produce tiny granules of pure silver when exposed to light.
Talbot’s images were produced as ‘negatives’ on paper, and multiple ‘positive’ copies could be printed from each one.
Both these methods were clumsy and complicated.
New developments focussed on more convenient ways to attach the silver compounds to photographic plates, and on reducing exposure times.
The most successful was invented in the 1870s by Richard Maddox (1816–1902) and used gelatin to bind the silver compound to the plate.
Gelatin is still used in most camera film today.
Until the late 1880s, photography was largely in the hands of professionals who would buy or prepare their own photographic plates and develop the images themselves.
In 1884, American inventor George Eastman (1854–1932) pioneered the use of film on rolls, first with paper and from 1889 with celluloid.
Eastman started the Kodak company, which brought photography to ordinary people with its Brownie camera (1900).
The first commercially successful technology for taking colour photographs was the autochrome process – colour photographs made on glass.
The first colour film, celluloid with layers of emulsion sensitive to different colours, was available in the 1930s.
Sixty years later the digital photography revolution began, with images captured as electrical signals instead of a collection of silver granules.
The advantages of digital cameras are the convenience of being able to see and print an image immediately, of being able to delete sub-standard ones (instead of having to wait until they are developed) and of being able to catalogue and store pictures electronically.
The early years of the 21st Century saw the development of smartphones containing digital cameras capable of taking high-resolution pictures.
But some photographers keep faith with film cameras, claiming image quality is superior.