Cameras Have Changed Our Lives When cameras first were invented, they were big wooden clumsy things. Instead of film they use copper plates coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapor. The very first photo to survive was a photo taken in France and thought to be from around 1826. It is not very clear but must have seemed like a miracle at the time. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to see a photo for the first time. It was the early equivalent of going to the moon. Cameras remained large wooden boxes for a long time. The photos opened up a whole new world for us, many times introducing us to exotic foreign lands, but it had its grim side. For the first time the camera was used to show us the death and carnage. It is said the first time a camera was used in war was in the Mexican American War. Even though the camera was used during a war no dead bodies were shown. So, what was it used for? It was used for, mostly portraits and street scenes. When the camera was used to depict the American Civil War, Matthew B. Brady decided to show the horror of war and put everything on the table. I always wondered if he secretly did this so as to prevent future wars. It made him the most famous photographer of his time. It certainly didn’t work if that was what he was trying to do. Others have invented weapons which they believed would end war and that was why the Gatling gun was invented, but again it didn’t end war and just made weapons fiercer. Glass plates replaced the early copper plates use to record images and were used from 1850 and some people were still using them up to the 1920s. The first film for photography was invented by George Eastman in 1885. In those days there was no color film and all the images were in black and white. There was a process to create color photos which was suggested in 1855 which enabled Thomas Sutton to make a color print. One way to create color prints was to add colors by hand, and as time went by, this became a common practice. I had a relative who had a job doing this in the 1940s. The development of roll film resulted in smaller cameras. Cameras were just shrinking in size. There were many spy movies when I was young showing spies using miniature cameras to take photos of secret documents after they broke into headquarters and such. When I was young, I remember thinking how cool those cameras were. My mother had bought a Brownie camera, which was essentially a small box without much of a lens, but it took satisfactory family photos and was cheap. The most expensive part of the photography was getting the film developed. The Polaroid Company shocked us all when it came out with a camera which could develop the photos inside the camera after you took a photo. This allowed someone to wait for a couple of minutes and see a photo you just took. I remember how incredible I thought this was. It was a little more expensive than the old method, but it was fun. The first digital camera was invented by Eastman Kodak in 1975. It was said Kodak hid the camera. Why would they do that? At the time they were one of the biggest manufactures of film and the camera would do away with film. The plan backfired when others invented their own digital cameras. I remember the first one I bought. I thought it was incredible. It had a low pixel count, but was good enough to take photos. The digital cameras kept improving and stuffing more pixels into their photos. As far as I am concerned the digital cameras got as good, over the years, as the film cameras at taking photos. There was another element to consider and that was the fact you saved much money since no development was required. Besides the fact you got instant photos, you could take thousands of photos without the battery running out. You could store the photos on a small card and print them out by connecting the camera to a computer, if you wanted a hard copy. Then it happened, the photo revolution. The first commercial phone was the Japanese Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210. In the year 2,000 a flip phone with a camera came out. It was developed by Sharp. Today the smart phone seems to be everywhere and the cameras they contain are as good as the digital cameras were, if not better in some cases. Not only do we all have cameras now, because they are built into our phones, but our phones are much more than just phones with cameras, they are pocket computers which are even more powerful than computers were a decade before. Two aspects of photography I have not mentioned yet are movies and video. The Kinetograph was invented in 1890. It was a primitive movie camera. Two years later the Kinestoscope, was invented which was a projector for the movies. Both were invented by William Dickson the assistant to Thomas Edison. People were truly amazed when they saw the early movies. I imagine the subject could have been anything and the movie theater would still be packed as long as there was some kind of motion to show off the new process. Who would have believed in those days we would all be carrying a movie camera and screen in our pockets along with a microphone to add sound to our movies. Movies have come a long way and been, in many cases, replaced with video. Anyone one of us can make a movie. All one has to do is get on the internet to see thousands of movies people made with their phones. This has contributed to making our lives easier in many ways. The first thing that comes into my head are the help videos on YouTube. One can find just about how to do anything by searching for it, especially on YouTube. Video is used in every aspect of our lives. NASA uses it to examine planets, asteroids and just about every heavenly body it goes to, contributing to our knowledge about the universe. We entertain ourselves by looking at video from streaming services. Video has so many uses I could fill a book with them. Yes, cameras have come a very long way and who can tell what they might be like in the future?
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