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French Inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera to burn a permanent image of the countryside at his Le Gras, estate onto a chemical-coated pewter plate. He names his technique "heliography," meaning "sun drawing." The black-and-white exposure takes eight hours and fades significantly, but an image is still visible on the plate today.
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In early 1839, French painter and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre photographs a Paris street scene from his apartment window using a camera. The long exposure time (several minutes) means moving objects like pedestrians and carriages don't appear in the photo. But an unidentified man who stops for a shoeshine remains still long enough to unwittingly become the first person ever photographed.
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Felix Tournachon, better known Nadar, combines his interests— aeronautics, journalism, and photography— and becomes the first to capture an aerial photograph in a balloon over Paris in 1858.
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The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell creates a 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,
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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. It also causes a popular stir about the potential of cameras to study movement.
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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.
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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, The developed photos are the first ever to show Earth from space,
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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.
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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.
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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.
