World Photography Day 2019: Most interesting facts, first ever photo and more
From taking over eight hours for an image to process to instant photos, thanks to mobiles, photography has come a long way! Here are some of the most interesting facts about it:
When French artist and photographer, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, invented the first practical photographic process in 1837, little did he know that he would become one of the fathers of photography. His invention was called the daguerreotype process of photography, and it was the Polaroid of it’s day, producing a unique image that could only be replicated by photographing the original.
On August 19, 1839, France bought the patent for the daguerreotype and released it ‘free to the world’, marking the beginning of World Photography Day. From taking over eight hours for an image to process to instant photos thanks to mobiles, photography has come a long way! Here are some of the most interesting facts about photography:
1. While the daguerreotype was the first practical photographic process, heliography was an earlier, more complex process for permanent photographs developed in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
2. Back in the day, the minimum exposure time needed to create a photograph was approximately eight hours. No wonder people never smiled in pictures back then, it would be impossible to hold your smile that long!
3. The first ever movement photo, The Horse In Motion, was produced by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, and it set the stage for the first motion pictures. Through his photographs, the Englishman was investigating whether all four hooves of the horse were off the ground simultaneously when it ran.
4. A Mumbai-based jeweller by profession and photographer by passion, Dillish Parekh, has made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the ‘World’s Largest Camera Collection’. Earlier Dillish held the record for owning 2,634 vintage and antique cameras previously, and later went on to break his own record when he collected over 4,425 cameras.
5. Kodak, one of the oldest companies that produces camera-related products, was founded in the 1890s by George Eastman. Eastman called his company Kodak at random, according to him the word is impossible to pronounce and unique, unlike existing words.
6. The first self-contained digital camera was invented by Steven Sasson when he worked at Eastman Kodak in 1975. It was not the first camera that produced digital images, but was the first hand-held digital camera. Weighing at 3.6 kgs, the 100 × 100 resolution (0.01 megapixels) camera took 23 seconds to process images that would develop into black and white images.
7. Thanks to digital, mobile and instant photography, now, over 350 billion photos are now taken every year around the world.
8. The first ever photo of the Moon was taken in 1851 and the first photo of its dark side was taken in 1959. The film used to capture the photos on NASA’s Apollo 11 moon missions was manufactured by Kodak.
9. Victor Hasselblad AB is a Swedish manufacturer of medium format cameras, and is best known for two things: the classic medium format cameras it’s been producing (10,000 cameras per year out of a three storey building) since World War II and its Hasselblad camera, which was used during the first human moon landings as part of NASA’s Apollo program missions. There are 12 Hasselblad cameras left on the surface of the moon today.
