History of Photography

Photography was derived from the Greek words photos, which means light, and graphein, which means to draw. Photography is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.

In 1826, the French inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, created the Permanent Image using the camera obscura. The image was of the countryside at his Le Gras estate in France, which was burnt onto a chemical coated pewter plate. Niépce named his technique ‘heliography’ meaning ‘sun drawing’. The image is still visible on the plate today but the black and white exposure takes eight hours and fades significantly.

In early 1839, French painter and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre took the first photo of a person. The long exposure time meant that moving objects like pedestrians and carriages didn’t appear in the photo but an indentified man who stops for a shoeshine remains as the first ever person to be photographed.

In 1847, early photography pioneer Thomas Easterly captured the first photograph of lightning.

In 1847, during the Mexican-American War, Charles J. Betts offered to photograph the ‘dead and wounded’. The first official war photos are of the Crimean War from 1855 to 1856.

Felix Tournachon, better known by the name Nadar, combined his interests— aeronautics, journalism, and photography— and became the first to capture an aerial photograph in a tethered balloon over Paris in 1858. This was the first Bird’s-eye view photograph.

In 1861, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell took the first colour photograph. He did this by overlaying three black and white images each passed through three filters-red, green and blue-onto a single screen.