The camera itself and being able to take photos is one of those things we take for granted today. But have you ever wondered how and when photography and cameras were invented. The history of photography and cameras began as early as the 1820's. Nowadays digital photos and storage has become the standard.
Jacques Mandé Daguerre and Nicephore Niepce can be seen as the first inventors of modern photography. They successfully experimented with a chemical component from chalk and silver, which , when exposed to light, darkens. This type of technology used a glass negative to cement the picture.
You probably seen in some old cowboy/western movies the earliest types of cameras available at that time, and the next step was to move to manual cameras with film. This film or negative would capture the image on a roll to be developed in a dark room which is to prevent over exposure. These manual cameras used a theory of setting up shots. In other words they were really hard to handle. The photographer had to understand things like aperture, shutter speed, white balance, and metering to obtain the best possible picture. As you can understand this meant you spent a lot of time setting up the shot and probably had to be a professional.
Now, to furher explain, aperture is the amount of light the lens will let in. Depth and focusing of field are also important when setting the aperture on your camera. You, as the photographer, have to know what numbers will allow more light to enter the lens and naturally also the converse - in order to avoid over exposure and blurriness. Shutter speed is the amount of time a lens is open for the picture. When taking pictures in a darkened room without flash you may have found that your camera takes a while to actually imprint the picture on the negative. This is due to the fact that the light is dim and the shutter therefore must correct for the lack of light.
After the manual cameras, came the the automatic cameras. The camera became physically lighter and smaller. Another improvement was that aperture and shutter speed was programmed into the camera by the settings. ISO became important. ISO is the actual film speed. This meant that of taking minutes to set up a shot you now just could pick the correct setting and hold the button down to focus.
As said in the beginning, digital cameras have now became the new era in photography. Now we can see the picture we take without the use of negatives and films. Moreover we can easily send the pictures to people we know and quickly enough use our computer printers at home to create prints. With this, photography has surely enough gone from being just a profession to a technique letting everyone take pictures. Of course the profession will remain. There is still a need for quality in taking professional grade photographs. However, the fact that all of us nowadays can take good quality photos is of course amazing.
