Tutorials Video

A History of Photography

By Infinite Creation · History · ~20 min

A 1960s mid-century comic book style editorial illustration showing a video editor and a director reviewing the cut together, with a camera on a tripod, an LED panel light on a stand, a colour grading panel with trackballs visible in the frame.

Overview

Photography's history is a chain of chemistry and optics breakthroughs, each solving the previous method's biggest limitation (exposure time, permanence, portability, color) and several of the vocabulary and convention choices from that chemical era (f-stops, ISO, the shutter itself) persist unchanged into fully digital cameras.

Steps

The first fixed images (1820s-1830s)

Nicéphore Niépce's 1826 or 1827 heliograph is generally regarded as the earliest surviving photograph, requiring an exposure of at least several hours. Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype process, announced in 1839, reduced exposure times to a still-lengthy several minutes but produced a sharp, detailed, and (crucially) reasonably practical image, and is often treated as photography's true public debut.

Film, portability, and mass adoption (1880s-1900s)

George Eastman's Kodak camera (1888) and, more importantly, flexible roll film replaced fragile glass plates, and the marketing promise 'you press the button, we do the rest' (Kodak handled development) made photography accessible to non-experts for the first time, a genuine democratization moment directly analogous to the smartphone camera a century later.

Standardizing exposure: f-stops, film speed, and the shutter (1900s-1940s)

The f-stop numbering system (f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8...) standardizing aperture across different lenses, and film speed ratings (which became ISO) both emerged from decades of manufacturers needing interoperable, predictable exposure math, the same math still used in fully digital cameras today. The mechanical shutter, which literally opens and closes to control exposure time, gave photography and later video the vocabulary ('shutter speed') that persists even in devices with no physical shutter at all.

Color, then digital, photography (1930s-2000s)

Kodachrome (1935) made color photography commercially practical, though black-and-white remained dominant in photojournalism for decades afterward for cost and archival-permanence reasons. Digital photography, commercially viable from the late 1980s-1990s and dominant by the mid-2000s, replaced the chemical process entirely but kept its vocabulary (aperture, ISO, shutter speed) because the underlying exposure physics (how much light reaches the sensor, for how long) hadn't changed at all.

Pro Tips

Every camera setting a photographer adjusts today (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) is vocabulary inherited from 19th and early 20th century chemical photography, not a digital-era invention.
Kodak's 'you press the button, we do the rest' democratization of photography in 1888 is the direct ancestor of the smartphone camera's democratization of both photography and video a century later.
Photojournalism's slow, cost-driven adoption of color (well into the late 20th century in many outlets) is a reminder that new formats often lag behind their technical availability for economic and stylistic reasons, not just technical ones.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Photography's chemical era set the exposure vocabulary and conventions that digital cameras inherited wholesale. The physics of light and exposure never changed even as the recording medium did completely.

Quick Timeline

1826/27: Niépce's first fixed photographic image.
1839: Daguerre's practical daguerreotype process.
1888: Kodak roll film camera democratizes photography.
1935: Kodachrome makes color photography practical.
Late 1980s-2000s: Digital photography becomes dominant.

Why This Still Matters

Anyone learning still photography fundamentals today (see this site's own photography fundamentals tutorial) is learning a vocabulary and set of controls (aperture, shutter, ISO) that are direct, unmodified inheritances from 19th and early 20th century chemical photography. The medium changed from chemistry to silicon. The exposure triangle didn't.

Where This Fits

Photography is the capture link for still images, and A History of Broadcast Technology follows images into transmission and display.

FAQ

Q: Why do f-stops use such an odd numbering sequence (f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8)?
A: Each standard stop represents a halving or doubling of the amount of light reaching the film or sensor, and because aperture area scales with the square of the f-number, the sequence follows roughly the square root of 2 (1.4, 2, 2.8, 4...) to produce even light-doubling steps, an elegant solution standardized industry-wide in the early-to-mid 20th century.

Q: When did digital photography actually overtake film?
A: Digital cameras became broadly viable for professional and enthusiast use through the 1990s-early 2000s, and consumer film sales collapsed sharply through the mid-to-late 2000s as digital compact cameras and then camera phones became widespread. The transition took roughly 15-20 years from first viable digital cameras to film becoming a niche/enthusiast format.

Sources

The patent and the museum page below were read. The other dated claims on this page were not re-checked against a primary record in this pass. That includes Daguerre's 1839 announcement, Kodachrome in 1935, and the slogan quoted on this page. Checked 21 September 2026.

US Patent 388,850, Camera. George Eastman. Filed 30 March 1888 and granted 4 September 1888. The description says the invention relates to detective cameras and to the case, the lens support and shutter, and the film-holder.
Harry Ransom Center, the Niepce heliograph. The Center dates View from the Window at Le Gras to 1827 and says the plate needed several days of exposure to sunlight. This page gives 1826 or 1827 and an exposure of at least several hours, which is less specific than the Center's account.