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Sunday 24 November 2013

Camera

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the earliest surviving photograph on a pewter plate in 1826.

The British polymath William Talbot, inventor of one of the earliest cameras was inspired by his inability to draw. He described one of his sketches as "melancholy to behold", wishing for a way to fix on paper the fleeting photographic images that had been observed for centuries using camera obscura.

It was Talbot who invented the negative/positive process, helping photography to pass from novelty into ubiquity.

To have your picture taken by the very first camera you would have had to sit still for 8 hours.

The word “camera” originally meant a judicial or legislative chamber. Its modern use came from “camera obscura” a darkened room or box used as a pinhole camera.

The Giroux daguerreotype camera was the first to be commercially produced. Invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre it was introduced worldwide in 1839.

The Giroux daguerreotype camera,

The photographic single-lens reflex camera (SLR) was invented in 1861 by Thomas Sutton, a photography author and camera inventor who ran a photography related company together with Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard on Jersey. Only a few of his SLR's were made.

George Eastman registered the trademark Kodak and received a patent for his roll film camera on September 4, 1888. The Kodak camera was one of the first successful mass-market cameras that made photography more accessible to the general public. It was designed to be simple to use, and it came pre-loaded with a roll of flexible film capable of taking 100 photographs. After the roll was used up, the entire camera was sent back to the Kodak company for film development and printing. Eastman's marketing slogan for the Kodak camera was "You press the button, we do the rest," emphasizing its ease of use.

George Eastman's innovations revolutionized photography and played a crucial role in making photography a popular hobby and a part of everyday life for many people. The Kodak company went on to become a major player in the photographic industry and played a key role in the development of modern photography.

George Eastman hated having his picture taken.

The Brownie box camera, introduced by Eastman Kodak, sold for $1.00 in 1900. The camera's 6-exposure film sold for 15 cents.

The Brownie box camera captured the imagination of Edwardian England, with over half of the first-year sales of 100,000 made in the UK. Queen Alexandra was among the early adopters and the photo albums she compiled of friends and family are still in Windsor Castle today.


The Reverend Hannibal Goodwin, the inventor of celluloid photographic film was an Episcopal priest at the House of Prayer in Newark, New Jersey. He was motivated to search for a non-breakable, and clear substance on which he could place the images he utilized in his Biblical teachings. On May 2, 1887, the Reverend Goodwin filed his patent for a method of making transparent, flexible roll film out of nitrocellulose film base, but the patent was not granted until September 13, 1898. In the meantime, George Eastman had already started production of roll-film using his own process.

Goodwin's transparent, flexible roll film was used in Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, an early machine for viewing animation.


At the turn of the 20th century, people said "prunes" instead of "cheese" for the camera because a small mouth was considered beautiful.

When US scientist Edwin H Land invented the first inexpensive filters capable of polarizing light, he called it Polaroid film.

The initial major application for the film was for sunglasses and scientific work. The Polaroid camera came about as a result of a holiday trip in 1943 to New Mexico, when Land's three-year-old daughter, Jennifer, asked why she could not immediately see the photographs he had taken of her.

Edwin Land demonstrated the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America on February 21, 1947 in New York City.

The first instant Polaroid cameras went on sale in a Boston department store for $89.75 ($1000 in today’s money) on November 26, 1948. All 57 had sold by the end of the day.


The Hasselblad cameras used during the Apollo 11 mission used a special type of film called Ektachrome MS, which was a high-resolution, color motion-picture film. The film magazines were pre-loaded with 70mm film before the mission and were changed inside the Lunar Module. The astronauts did not change films outside at all. The photographs taken by the Hasselblad cameras during the Apollo 11 mission were scanned and transferred to the Earth as digital images.

Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first digital camera in 1975. It resembled a toaster.

The first photo Sasson took with his digital camera was of a female lab assistant. It boasted just 0.01 megapixels and took almost a minute to record and display.

Digital cameras were developed so spy satellites could send images back to earth more quickly. Before the invention of digital cameras, spy satellites used film. After the film was shot, the satellites loaded the footage into capsules and dropped them from orbit into the atmosphere for collection.

Digital cameras have outsold cameras using film since 2003.

When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second.

Wearing yellow makes you look bigger on camera; green, smaller.

Camera shutter speed "B" stands for bulb.

The CIA has made a disk camera that is as big as a quarter. This gadget can take many pictures at a time when the disk is opened.

Sources Independent 3/11/07, Radio Times 14-20th Apr 2007, Daily Express Greatfacts.com

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