Lantern slides were the visual entertainment of choice for over 200 years before the first photographs were taken. These were coloured or black and white pictures which were projected onto a blank wall using a candle or oil lamp.
Nicephore Nepce, a Frenchman produced the first permanent portrait photography famously known as ’The View From The Window At LeGras’ as long ago as 1826.
In the 186 years since then, over 3.5 trillion pictures have been taken.
The first colour photograph was of a Scottish tartan ribbon in 1861 and it was taken by Physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
The first high speed photograph was taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 using a series of trip wires as a horse galloped.
In 1888 George Eastman’s first Kodak camera contained a 20 foot roll of paper - enough for one hundred 2.5" diameter round images.
A year later, Kodak improved the camera so that it used rolls of film rather than paper.
In 1890, the Kodak Brownie box roll film camera was introduced for one dollar.
Professional portrait photography proliferated even though it was now possible to take snaps at home, especially with the intervention of the world wars when every person desired a permanent keepsake of the loved ones they may never see again.
And some of the portrait photographers themselves became part of the war effort as sound rangers mapping the position of enemy guns by recording sound waves onto celluloid film before radar was devised.
In 1960, NASA changed from analog to digital signals with their space probes to map the face of the moon. The advance of computer technology meant that NASA used computers to improve the images delivered by the space probes.
1972 saw Texas Instruments patenting the first film-free electronic camera.
In 1981, Sony launched the first commercial electronic still camera - called the Mavica. The images were recorded onto a mini disc and then put into a video reader attached to a tv display or colour printer. In reality it was in fact a camcorder that took video stills.
The first customer level digital cameras worked through a computer via a serial wire. The first was Apple’s QuickTake 100 on 17 February 1994, next came Kodak’s DC40 on March 28 1995, Casio’s QV-11 in late 1995 and the Sony Cyber Shot digital still camera in 1996.
Not surprisingly, by 2011, of the 380 billion photographs taken, only 4billion of those used analogue.
73% of digital camera owners will take a photo at least once a month with 83% of these using some form of computer software to edit those shots, but nine out of ten smart phone owners will also take that one photo per month and 15% of those will then edit the image on their phone too.
Nowadays, the advent of cameras in mobile phones together with the rise of social media, has meant that 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day and 26 photos to Instagram a second.
Amazing statistics!
