History of the camera

The history of the camera can be traced much further back than the introduction of photography. Cameras evolved from the camera obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic technology, including daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film, and to the modern day with digital cameras.

PINHOLE CAMERA

The first pinhole camera (also called the Camera Obscura) was invented by Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham).

Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham) was a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000AD. He invented the first pinhole camera (also called the Camera Obscura} and was able to explain why the images were upside down.

The first casual reference to the optic laws that made pinhole cameras possible was observed and noted by Aristotle around 330 BC. He questioned why the sun could make a circular image when it shined through a square hole.

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

On a summer day in 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce developed the first photographic image with a camera obscura. 

Prior to Niepce, people just used the camera obscura for viewing or drawing purposes, not for making photographs. By letting light draw the picture, Niepce's heliographs, or sun prints as they were called, were the prototype for the modern photograph.

Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen and then exposed it to light. The shadowy areas of the engraving blocked light, but the whiter areas permitted light to react with the chemicals on the plate. When Niepce placed the metal plate in a solvent, gradually an image, until then invisible, appeared.

However, Niepce's photograph required eight hours of light exposure to create and would soon fade away.

Daguerreotypes and calotypes

After Niépce's death in 1833, his partner Louis Daguerre 

continued to experiment and by 1837 had created the first practical photographic process, which he named the daguerreotype and publicly unveiled in 1839.

Daguerre treated a silver-plated sheet of copper with iodine vapor to give it a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide. 

After exposure in the camera, the image was developed by mercury vapor and fixed with a strong solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride).

 Henry Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. As commercialized, both processes used very simple cameras consisting of two nested boxes. 

The rear box had a removable ground glass screen and could slide in and out to adjust the focus. 

After focusing, the ground glass was replaced with a light-tight holder containing the sensitized plate or paper and the lens was capped. 

Then the photographer opened the front cover of the holder, uncapped the lens, and counted off as many minutes as the lighting conditions seemed to require before replacing the cap and closing the holder. Despite this mechanical simplicity, high-quality achromatic lenses were standard.

DRY PLATE NEGATIVES & HAND-HELD CAMERAS

In 1879, the dry plate was invented, a glass negative plate with a dried gelatin emulsion. Dry plates could be stored for a period of time. This meant photographers no longer needed portable darkrooms and could now hire technicians to develop their photographs. Dry processes absorbed light so rapidly that the hand-held camera was now possible.

Dry plates

Collodion dry plates had been available since 1857, thanks to the work of Désiré van Monckhoven, 

but it was not until the invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox 

that the wet plate process could be rivaled in quality and speed. The 1878 discovery that heat-ripening a gelatin emulsion greatly increased its sensitivity finally made so-called "instantaneous" snapshot exposures practical. For the first time, a tripod or other support was no longer an absolute necessity. With daylight and a fast plate or film, a small camera could be hand-held while taking the picture. The ranks of amateur photographers swelled and informal "candid" portraits became popular. There was a proliferation of camera designs, from single- and twin-lens reflexes to large and bulky field cameras, simple box cameras, and even "detective cameras" disguised as pocket watches, hats, or other objects.

The short exposure times that made candid photography possible also necessitated another innovation, the mechanical shutter. The very first shutters were separate accessories, though built-in shutters were common by the end of the 19th century.

FLEXIBLE ROLL FILM

In 1889, George Eastman

 invented film with a base that was flexible, unbreakable and could be rolled. Emulsions coated on a cellulose nitrate film base, such as Eastman's, made the mass-produced box camera a reality.

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS

In the early 1940s, commercially viable color films (except Kodachrome) were brought to the market. These films used the modern technology of dye-coupled colors in which a chemical process connects the three dye layers together to create an apparent color image.

Kodak and the birth of film

he use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1888-1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer. 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.

35 mm

A number of manufacturers started to use 35mm film for still photography between 1905 and 1913. The first 35mm cameras available to the public, and reaching significant numbers in sales were the Tourist Multiple, in 1913, and the Simplex, in 1914.

Oskar Barnack, who was in charge of research and development at Leitz, decided to investigate using 35 mm cine film for still cameras while attempting to build a compact camera capable of making high-quality enlargements. He built his prototype 35 mm camera (Ur-Leica) around 1913, though further development was delayed for several years by World War I. It wasn't until after World War I that Leica commercialized their first 35mm Cameras. Leitz test-marketed the design between 1923 and 1924, receiving enough positive feedback that the camera was put into production as the Leica I (for Leitz camera) in 1925. The Leica's immediate popularity spawned a number of competitors, most notably the Contax (introduced in 1932), and cemented the position of 35 mm as the format of choice for high-end compact cameras.

Kodak got into the market with the Retina I in 1934,

 which introduced the 135 cartridge used in all modern 35 mm cameras. Although the Retina was comparatively inexpensive, 35 mm cameras were still out of reach for most people and rollfilm remained the format of choice for mass-market cameras. This changed in 1936 with the introduction of the inexpensive Argus A 

and to an even greater extent in 1939 with the arrival of the immensely popular Argus C3.

 Although the cheapest cameras still used rollfilm, 35 mm film had come to dominate the market by the time the C3 was discontinued in 1966.

The fledgling Japanese camera industry began to take off in 1936 with the Canon 35 mm rangefinder,

 an improved version of the 1933 Kwanon prototype.

 Japanese cameras would begin to become popular in the West after Korean War veterans and soldiers stationed in Japan brought them back to the United States and elsewhere.

Leica

The Leica camera designed by Oskar Barnack 

used 35 mm film, and proved that a format as small as 24 mm × 36 mm was suitable for professional photography.

Although Barnack designed his prototype camera around 1913, the first experimental production run of ur-Leicas (Serial No. 100 to 130) did not take place until 1923. Full-scale production of the Leica did not begin until 1925. While by that time there were at least a dozen other 35 mm cameras available, the Leica was a success, and came to be associated with the format. Mostly because of this 35 mm popularity, as well as entire company legacy, early Leica cameras considered as highly collectible items these days. The original Leica prototype holds the record as being the world's most expensive camera

TLRs and SLRs

The first practical reflex camera was the Franke & Heidecke Rolleiflex medium format TLR of 1928. Though both single- and twin-lens reflex cameras had been available for decades, they were too bulky to achieve much popularity. The Rolleiflex, however, was sufficiently compact to achieve widespread popularity and the medium-format TLR design became popular for both high- and low-end cameras.

twin-lens reflex camera

A twin-lens reflex camera (TLR) is a type of camera with two objective lenses of the same focal length. One of the lenses is the photographic objective or "taking lens" (the lens that takes the picture), while the other is used for the view finder system, which is usually viewed from above at waist level.

In addition to the objective, the viewfinder consists of a 45-degree mirror (the reason for the word reflex in the name), a matte focusing screen at the top of the camera, and a pop-up hood surrounding it. The two objectives are connected, so that the focus shown on the focusing screen will be exactly the same as on the film. However, many inexpensive "pseudo" TLRs are fixed-focus models. 

Most TLRs use leaf shutters 

with shutter speeds up to 1/500th sec with a B setting.

For practical purposes, all TLRs are film cameras, most often using 120 film, although there are many examples which used 620 film, 127 film, and 35mm film. No general-purpose digital TLR cameras exist, since the heyday of TLR cameras ended long before the era of digital cameras. In 2015, MiNT Camera released Instantflex TL70,

 a twin-lens reflex camera that uses Fuji instax mini film.

single-lens reflex camera

A single-lens reflex camera (SLR) is a camera that typically uses a mirror and prism system (hence "reflex" from the mirror's reflection) that permits the photographer to view through the lens and see exactly what will be captured. With twin lens reflex and rangefinder cameras, the viewed image could be significantly different from the final image. When the shutter button is pressed on a mechanical SLR, the mirror flips out of the light path, allowing light to pass through to the light receptor and the image to be captured.