Snapshot!

Photography is undoubtedly the most popular art form that everyone can take part in.

There have always been people who wanted to document events. Rather than rely on drawings and paintings, they embraced the miraculous art of photography way back in its very early days in the early-to-mid 1800s.

Great Photographic Minds

The first Daguerreotype photo of a Paris street was taken in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. Interestingly, other photographic pioneers were working along similar lines at the same time.

Hercules Florence had developed a similar process in 1832 which he called Photographie and in 1840 William Fox Talbot created the Calotype (sometimes also called the Talbotype after its inventor) which created negative images.

In subsequent years, photography became very popular and certainly available to the man in the street. However, because of the equipment and chemical developing required, most photographs were taken by specialist photographers. This had less to do with artistic framing of the subject and more to do with the equipment required.

Kodak Brownie

Fast forward to the 1950s when the Kodak Brownie was the camera for everyman and what every child wanted in their Christmas stocking. The first Brownie was actually introduced way back in 1900. It was made from a cardboard box and cost $1.

The affordable Brownie was largely responsible for the surge of interest in photography and while this interest has waxed and waned over the years, the invention of the digital camera once again brought photography back to the masses.

Digital Cameras

Digital photography is not as new as you might think. Its roots can be traced back to the early 1960s and NASA used digital imaging with their space probes to map the surface of the moon.

The first digital camera is generally acknowledged as being developed by Steven Sasson of Eastman Kodak in 1975. It weighed 8lbs, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels and took 23 seconds to produce a black and white image!

The first consumer digital camera to go on sale was probably the Dycom Model 1 in 1990. Over the next few years, companies such as Sony, Casio and Kodak released affordable digital cameras with high enough resolution to take reasonable snapshots.

Resolution

The resolution of the early digital cameras was always their main problem as they could not capture the detail of a film camera. While they were fine for family and holiday shots, no serious photographer would use them. Even today, many photographers prefer film.

Now, however, with the high megapixel resolution of modern digital SLR cameras, the differences between film and digital are narrowing and virtually all professional photographers have a digital camera in their collection.

Photo Editing

Not only are digital cameras often more cost-effective in terms of consumables - you can use the same memory card again and again after transferring the photos to a dongle or hard disk - but they can be edited very easily with photo editing software.

In fact, modern software allows you to manipulate photos so much that it literally blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. This has given rise to a whole new type of artist, one who manipulates their own or other people’s images to create something new.

Whether you use image editing to fix red eye problems, to enhance the sky, remove unwanted background objects or to move a smiling face from one photo and put it in a group shot, there’s no denying the seductive power of such software.

Photo Phone

Cameras were incorporated into mobile phones in 2001 and more photos are now probably taken with phones than with dedicated cameras!

They are undoubtedly responsible for the rising popularity of social blogs. The ease with which you can take a photo and upload to a site means everyone can do it. And everyone does!

Photos are now used as a form of social commentary. Rather than tell people where you were and what you were doing, you can show them!

Future Shots

Cameras and photography have moved and developed with technology and photography is more universal and affordable that it ever was before. Whether you want to capture holidays and events or indulge your artistic side with photo editing, there are affordable cameras and software to suit all requirements and all pockets.

You have every reason to smile when someone says: “Say Cheese”.