In the less than 200-year period during which photography was invented and went through the various stages of its development, it’s perhaps the one piece of technology which consistently managed to progress as a result of the competition between a lot of different contributions from different inventors, companies and even consumers.
Think about it, from Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s 1816 creation of negative images through the process of heliography right up to the DSLR cameras, mirrorless, compact-system cameras (CSCS) and even the cameras integrated into our smartphones today, we now essentially have almost two centuries of technological advancement and refinement in our pockets. A quick run-through of this history of photography through the lenses of the folks over at Clifton Cameras makes for some really interesting history, particularly for those who have more than just a passing interest in taking snaps for your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter newsfeed.
Well the equipment we use today to take some super pictures may be more than a thousand times more compact and powerful than in the pioneering days, but a lot of appreciation has to go to those pioneers of the 1850s. The likes of Roger Frenton are still credited with some photographic work worthy of a period we can safely refer to as the golden age, with this English photographer capturing some harrowing images of landscapes hauntingly littered with cannonballs during the first world war, when he was despatched to the Crimean war in 1855. His and other photographers’ work is particularly laudable because even with today’s technology in the now highly evolved world of photography, some of the photos they managed to take, despite not being able to shoot motion, still can’t be matched in terms of their hard-hitting impact.
Kodak’s introduction of the n°1 box camera went a very long way in making photography more accessible to the public as this was the first real camera which was easy to use. By 1913, Oskar Barnack had perfected the 35mm format used in still photography, creating the first truly portable camera that was easy to carry. It was named the UR-Leica. Then came the Polaroid revolution with the debut of Dr. Edwin Land’s Polaroid camera in 1948, making the otherwise long and tricky process of developing photos much easier with instant images.
1975 perhaps changed the face of photography to what we know it to be today, with the first digital camera hitting the scene, weighing a whopping 3.6kg. It was a huge step in the direction of the high-quality, high resolution smartphone cameras we have today, but we’d still have to cycle right through the 1991 introduction of the first truly usable digital camera by Kodak to get to the mobile phone camera era and eventually to the smarphone camera era.
As powerful as smartphone cameras are though, photographers whose love affair with photography is either a serious hobby or a profession can never be satisfied with not getting what is essentially a proper, dedicated camera with all the accessories to go with, which they can use in many ways for their craft.
