-
First Permanent
The first permanent photo was taken in 1826 by french inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He did this by burning a picture onto some chemically coated pewter plate. This photo faded significantly but can still be seen today. -
First Photo Of A Person
IN early 1839 french chenist and painter Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre photographs a street in Paris from his apartment. The long exposure time ment that moving objects don't appear in the photo. Apart from a man who stopped long enough for a shoe shine. The man unknowingly became the ever person to be photographed. -
First Ariel Photo
Felix Tournachon combines his interests— aeronautics, journalism, and photography— and becomes the first to capture an aerial photograph in a tethered balloon over Paris in 1858. -
First colour photo
1861: First Color Photo
The enormously influential Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell creates a rudimentary color image by superimposing onto a single screen three black-and-white images each passed through three filters—red, green, and blue. His photo of a multicolored ribbon is the first to prove the efficacy of the three-color method, until then just a theory, and sets the stage for further color innovation, particularly by the Lumißre brothers in France. -
First Action Photo
English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, using new emulsions that allow nearly instantaneous photography, begins taking photograph sequences that capture animals and humans in motion. His 1878 photo series of a galloping horse, created with 12 cameras each outfitted with a trip wire, helps settle a disagreement over whether at any time in a horse's gait all four hooves leave the ground. (They do.) It also causes a popular stir about the potential of cameras to study mov -
First Under Water photo Taken
Ichthyologist William Longley and National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin use an Autochrome camera and a raft full of explosive magnesium flash powder to illuminate the shallows of Florida's Dry Tortugas and make the first undersea color photographs. The photos, which show reef scenes with fish, are published in the January 1927 National Geographic. -
First Photo Taken From Space
Researchers with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory strap a 35-millimeter camera to a German V-2 missile and launch it into space from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The camera snaps a picture every second and a half as the rocket ascends to 65 miles (105 kilometers) above the surface. The camera falls back to Earth and slams into the ground, but the film, contained in a steel cassette, is unharmed. The developed photos are the first ever to show Earth from space, -
First Map Of The Night Sky
National Geographic teams up with the California Institute of Technology for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a seven-year project to produce the first photographic map of the Northern Hemisphere's night sky. The work is done at the Palomar Observatory in California using "Big Schmidt," a new, 48-inch (122-centimeter) camera telescope. The result is a comprehensive study of the heavens that leads to the discovery of many new stars and galaxies and is still used by astronomers today. -
First All Colour Magazine
After decades of pioneering color photography technology, National Geographic magazine introduces a new era in February 1962, becoming the first major American periodical to print an all-color issue. The magazine goes on to publish more color in its editorial pages throughout 1962 than any other major magazine in the country. -
The First Digital Still
Kodak releases the first commercially available, professional digital camera in 1991. This device, extremely expensive and marketed to professional photographers, uses a Nikon F-3 camera body fitted with a digital sensor. Over the next five years, several companies come out with more affordable models, and today, the market is overwhelmed with thousands of digital still camera models.
