Cameras in Our Lives There is a new scientific camera in town and it is incredible. What makes it so incredible is the fact it has a very fast shutter speed and this allows the camera to catch things happening we could never see before. How fast is the shutter speed you ask? It is an incredible 1 trillionth of a second. It had mistakenly been listed as being one billionth of a second, but Phys.Org states the faster speed is correct. This camera will be very important in many areas of study, but it is being looked for with great anticipation in the field of atomic structures and such. Using the camera could unlock secrets which will allow us to advance in material science, medicine, and many other areas. Before the first photograph was ever taken, scientists noticed some substances were altered by light. This discovery was at the heart of the very first photograph. The earliest surviving photo is believed to be one known as View from the Window at Le Gras in France taken either in 1826 or 1827. It is thought the exposure must have taken several days. It is hard to see the image, but it is there. Another famous photo, taken about the same time was taken by Nicephore Niepce in France, and this one was named Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. These photos have been worked on today and copies were made to make them much clearer when displayed. Some old photos have even been colorized. The photographic process made a big leap with the invention of the daguerreotype process. Instead of silver nitrate, a copper plate which was coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapor was used to record images. After the plate was exposed, a mercury vapor was used to bring out the image. Mercury was a dangerous chemical and I imagine breathing in the vapor didn’t do the photographer any good. Cameras were big and bulky and usually made of wood and heavy to lug around. Cameras were the purview of only a few professional photographers for many years. In 1888, being a photographer got even easier, because George Eastman invented roll film. Much as the cell phone has found its way into every home, the camera did this first. Every American became a photographer and gone was those long exposure times where people had to be held up by frames so they would not move their heads. Photographs were now cheap enough to appear in books and newspapers. Lenses became improved as did the photographic paper itself. Developing photos became easier to develop and far less expensive. Then it happened, a Kodak employee named Steven Sasson invented the digital camera in 1975. The camera was a .01 megapixel and recorded the image onto tape. The story goes Kodak got cold feet thinking this camera would ruin their film and camera business so they hid the fact and it was only a matter of time before someone else would rediscover it. Kodak could have made a lot of money off the invention. Kodak had to declare bankruptcy in 2012, but is still around today providing digital printing products, along with film for movies and still film. As photography advanced, so did rocketry. In 1897 Nobel produced an aerial photograph with a rocket mounted camera. From that point on aerial photos became popular especially with the militaries of the world and in World War One everyone was doing it from planes, blimps, zeppelins, and balloons. This continued throughout world War 2. Something changed however, it was the fact the Germans were launching rockets and filming some or all of the launches. This made the connection between space and the camera and as years went by, the Soviets and Americans began to launch satellites and some were spy satellites with powerful cameras. Since they were analog in the beginning, a way to get the film to earth had to be figured out. The Americans would send a container with the film back to earth and employed special planes with nets to catch the containers. When digital cameras became good enough, the photos were beamed back to earth. Before the digital camera Polaroid invented a camera which could develop the photos inside the camera and let you get them within a minute or two after taking the photo. The film was more expensive than regular film, but you saved on the development costs. Many thought the digital camera was the end of the line for camera development, but then it happened. The cell phone was invented. At first, it was just a phone which ran on radio waves, but as time went by it got smaller and started to develop into a computer, a computer with a camera. Today some of the cameras in the cell phone rival those and even surpass those of many cameras. It became much more convenient to carry a camera everywhere because everyone wanted to carry their phones. Somewhere along the way, someone thought it might be a good idea to develop a security camera to protect their property. The government put them all around important buildings but then claimed when the Pentagon was attacked they didn’t have a photo of the so called plane which rammed into the building. Cameras are everywhere today and are even used with sensors to detect speeders and automatically send out tickets. That wasn’t enough for some who thought we should install facial recognition software with the cameras to catch criminals and this caused problems. Suddenly innocent people were being arrested and many places got rid of that software. Somewhere along the line photography became art in some cases, and some photographs began to sell for tidy sums of money. Mathew Brady was a photographer who photographed the American Civil War and it is thanks to him we have the photographic story of what happened. This was not the first time such horror of war was exposed in photographic form, in 1854 Roger Fenton photographed the landing at Balaclava. Photography has changed much of our lives. We now have something many before us never had, a way to remember what our departed loved ones looked like. Expanding this to video, we can see very realistic representations of them in their daily lives and hear them. It has been a blessing.
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