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The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection; the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light.

There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century. Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze used a light-sensitive slurry to capture images of cut-out letters on a bottle. However, he did not pursue making these results permanent. Around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt at capturing camera images in permanent form. His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy found no way to fix these images. In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce first managed to fix an image that was captured with a camera, but at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera were required and the earliest results were very crude. Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process. The daguerreotype required only minutes of exposure in the camera, and produced clear, finely detailed results. On August 2, 1839 Daguerre demonstrated the details of the process to the Chamber of Peers in Paris. On August 19 the technical details were made public in a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in the Palace of Institute (for granting the rights of the inventions to the public, Daguerre and Niépce were awarded generous annuities for life). When the metal based daguerreotype process was demonstrated formally to the public, the competitor approach of paper-based calotype negative and salt print processes invented by Henry Fox Talbot was already demonstrated in London (but with less publicity). Subsequent innovations made photography easier and more versatile. New materials reduced the required camera exposure time from minutes to seconds, and eventually to a small fraction of a second; new photographic media were more economical, sensitive or convenient. Since the 1850s, the collodion process with its glass-based photographic plates combined the high quality known from the Daguerreotype with the multiple print options known from the calotype and was commonly used for decades. In the mid-20th century, developments made it possible for amateurs to take pictures in natural color as well as in black-and-white. The commercial arrival of digital cameras in the 1990s revolutionized photography. During the first decade of the 21st century, film declined as digital cameras became cheaper, easier to use, and better in image quality.

A natural phenomenon, known as camera obscura or pinhole image, can project a (reversed) image through a small opening onto an opposite surface. The box type camera obscura was the basis for photographic cameras, as used in the earliest attempts to capture natural images in light sensitive materials.

This discovery could have been used to stabilize or "fix" a camera image captured with silver chloride, but was not picked up by the earliest photography experimenters. Schaaf in his history of photography considered her work on silver chemistry to represent a major step in the development of photography.

Paper with a coating of silver iodide was exposed in the camera and developed into a translucent negative image.

In the following decades, his recommendations were taken up by many European photographers, making the Middle East an important site for experimentation and training in the early history of photography.

He recognized the possibility of a combination with photography soon after Daguerre and Talbot announced their inventions and got Henry Fox Talbot to produce some calotype pairs for the stereoscope.

The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, a process inventors and brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière began working on in the 1890s and commercially introduced in 1907.

Quick Facts

• Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process.
• In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce first managed to fix an image that was captured with a camera, but at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera were required and the earliest results were very crude.
• The daguerreotype required only minutes of exposure in the camera, and produced clear, finely detailed results.
• New materials reduced the required camera exposure time from minutes to seconds, and eventually to a small fraction of a second; new photographic media were more economical, sensitive or convenient.
• His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy found no way to fix these images.

Source material: Wikipedia - "History of photography". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.