Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Our modern understanding of light and color begins with Isaac Newton
1685 ⇢ The vision of a box form of a Camera that was portable and
small was was envisioned by Johann Zahn, THOUGH it would be
nearly 150 years before technology was able to bring his vision to life.
View from the Window at Le Gras required an extremely long exposure (traditionally said to be eight hours,
but now believed to be several days) which resulted in sunlight being visible on both sides of the buildings.
The oldest surviving photograph of the image formed in a camera– View from the Window at Le Gras
The Kodak came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures and needed to be sent back to the factory for
processing and reloading when the roll was finished. By the end of the 19th century Eastman had expanded his
lineup to several models including both box and folding cameras. Photography could now reach the masses.
1884- 1924⇢ The camera went into production at the Leitz factory in
Germany. It was called the Leica from the initials of "Leitz Camera."
1926⇢ Underwater color photography was born with this shot of a
hogfish, photographed off the Florida Keys in the Gulf of Mexico by
Dr. William Longley and National Geographic staff photographer
Charles Martin
Equipped with cameras encased in waterproof housing and pounds of highly explosive magnesium flash
powder for underwater illumination, the pair pioneered underwater photography.
1929⇢ The major step forward to mass marketing of the TLR (twin-
lens reflex) came with the Rolliecord and then rollieflex, developed by
Franke & Heidecke in Germany.
1936⇢ The first 35mm SLR, the Ihagee Kine Exakta had a left-
handed shutter release and rapid film wind thumb lever, folding waist
level finder and 12 to 1/1000th second focal plane shutter.
1975⇢ The first ever digital camera was invented by Steven Sasson,
an engineer at Eastman Kodak.
The 8 pound camera recorded 0.01 megapixel black and white photos to a cassette tape. The first photograph
took 23 seconds to create.
To play back images, data was read from the tape and then displayed on a television set.
We've come a long way since then!
1984⇢ Steve McCurry captured one of the most famous portraits the
world had ever seen.
The Afghan girl with the haunting green eyes captivated everyone. That captivation proved, once again, the
power of photography to open eyes—and hearts and minds—with a single image.
The portrait appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985
1988⇢ Though it never hit the market the 1988 Fuji Fujix DS-1P
introduced an important technology– a removable SRAM (static
RAM) memory card developed with Toshiba.
1991⇢ The Nikon D1 was the first DSLR body designed from scratch
by a single manufacturer. It competely changed the game for SLRS at
that time- dropping the price of a digital SLR by more than half.
The original price the camera was sold at just under $5,000. It offered the image quality, build, and
performance that was required by photojournalists at this time. It, and DSLRs from Fujifilm and Canon, also
helped end the reign of Kodak in professional DSLRs.
2003⇢ When this 6MP DSLR was announced on the Internet, editors
scurried to redo the cover to trumpet the first DSLR priced below
$1,000 ($999.99, street, with kit lens). The Reb flew off the shelves
and proved the tipping point for countless serious amateur
photographers to switch from film to digital.
2005⇢ The Canon EOS 5D had the popular new market category all
to itself until 2008, when Nikon and Sony released their D700 and
Alpha 900.
It was Pop Photo’s Camera of the Year for ’05 provided full-frame capture to serious amateur photographers
and cash-strapped pros for the first time, with a price less than half of the bigger, heavier professional full-
framers.
It has been widely used to shoot TV shows such as House and even for movies, in addition to its' enormous
popularity among landscape photographers.
2008⇢ When Panasonic took the mirror and prism assembly out of a
DSLR and replaced them with an electronic viewfinder, the resulting
camera, the Lumix G1, became the world’s first Compact System
Camera.
Not only is this the fastest growing sector within the camera industry it’s one of the fastest growing of any
consumer electronics category – it now accounts for almost half of all interchangeable lens cameras sold in
Japan, for example while it’s approaching one third in Europe.
The main advantage of the CSC is in offering relatively high image quality, and interchangeable lenses, in a
small camera, with smaller lenses. But by casting aside the optical assembly from DSLRs the G1 also paved
the way for the wide spectrum of interchangeable lens cameras we see today, from every manufacturer, which
come with or without viewfinders, and with a variety of sensor sizes from DSLR sized down to compact
camera sized.