How it All Got Started

Photography hasn’t always been around. It was invented in 1839 by a Frenchman named Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. At first the process was complicated. It took forever for a picture to be finished, and early cameras were large and very heavy. It goes without saying that there weren’t any digital cameras or computers. Photographers used glass plates that had to be developed to make pictures. This meant that there weren’t many photographers, and the few people who did take pictures were professionals. If you wanted a photo of yourself you had to go to a photography studio, and this was a special occasion. This is why families owned very few pictures.

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of the first camera.

The invention of photography was a real revolution. Before photography, the only way to make pictures of the people and things around us was to paint them. After the resourceful American, George Eastman, invented film in 1889, taking photographs became easier and less expensive. Soon more and more people wanted to capture pictures of their world, and photography became popular. Around 1900, people started printing pictures in newspapers.

Film was used to take pictures until the end of the last century. Affordable digital cameras first became available around 2000. Your parents can probably remember taking their film to a store to be developed. This took a while, and sometimes you couldn’t see your finished pictures for days. Today everything is faster and easier. Technology and computers allow us to avoid using film so we can see our pictures immediately. It also costs much less than before.

Taking photographs used to be a special occasion.