Illuminating photography: From camera obscura to camera phone - Eva Timothy

Let me guess, you've got Facebook albums full of photos. You have photos on your computer desktop, on your mobile phone, on your bedroom wall. You see photos in magazines and newspapers, on the side of buses, and of course, in your family albums. We take photos for granted in a major way.

But, creating a picture that looked exactly like the person or thing that you were photographing wasn't always obvious. In fact, in the past, it was a big mystery. How could you, in essence, take your reflection in the mirror and freeze it in there?

In the 9th century, the Arab scientist Alhazen had come up with the idea of using the camera obscura, which was literally a dark room, or box, with a single, small hole in one side that let light through. This would project the image outside into the wall inside. During the Renaissance, artists like Leonardo DaVinci used this method to introduce 3-D scenes onto a flat plane so that they could copy things, like perspective, more easily.

In 1724, Johann Heinrich Schultz discovered that exposing certain silver compounds to light altered their appearance and left marks wherever the light touched. Essentially, Schultz found a way to record the images that Alhazen was able to project, but only for a little while. Schultz's images disappeared soon after he had made them. It wasn't until 1839 that people figured out how to project images onto light-sensitive surfaces that would retain the image after exposure, and thus, photography was born.

At that point, it was mostly two inventors who fought for the best way to make photos. One was British scientist Henry Fox Talbot, whose calotype process used paper and allowed many copies to be made from a single negative. The other inventor, Louis Daguerre, was an artist and chemist in France. He developed something called a daguerreotype, which used a silvered plate and which produced a sharper image.

But the daguerreotype could only make positive images so copies had to be made by taking another photo. In the end, the daguerreotype won out as the first commercially successful photographic process mostly because the government made it freely available to the public.

So now that photography was available, getting a picture of yourself would be a snap, right? Well, not exactly! This process still required a whole dark room at the location of the photograph, which was a big hassle. Picture the early photographers lugging enormous trailers with all their equipment wherever they wanted to take a picture. Not only that, but the early processes had extremely long exposure times.

To get a good photo, you would have to stand perfectly still for up to two minutes! This led to development of inventions like the head holder, a wire frame that would hide behind you while supporting your head. It's also why you don't see people smiling in early photographs. It's not that life was that bad, it was just hard to keep a steady grin for more than a few seconds, so people opted for a straight-faced look.

And then George Eastman came along. Eastman believed that everyone should have access to photography, and he spent many late nights mixing chemicals in his mother's kitchen to try to achieve a dry plate photographic process. This would allow exposed negatives to be stored and developed later at a more convenient place instead of carting those dark rooms, necessary for wet plates, around.

After starting a business, which initially made dry plates, Eastman eventually discovered plastic roll film that would fit in hand-held, inexpensive cameras. These cameras sold by the millions under the tag line, "You push the button, we do the rest." While Eastman was largely responsible for making photography a universal pastime, even he could not have dreamed of the ways photography had since shaped the world.

It's now estimated that over 380 billion photographs are taken each year. That's more photographs each day than were taken in the first hundred years after photography was invented. Say cheese!