For those of us alive today, we’ve seen the advent of the digital photography age. A large majority of young people even have their own cameras. Social networking sites such as Facebook encourage their members to upload multiple albums to create a type of photo-journal for your life. Let’s take a look back at the history of cameras and photography to see just how far this art form has come.

One popular, early ancestor of today’s picture-snappers were called camera obscuras. They did not function in the way we think of cameras; instead, they were more like projectors. In ancient times, camera obscuras were only able to project upside-down, yet proportionate, in color, and in perspective. The first camera obscura was designed by Alhazen, and was actually called a pinhole camera at first. In the 18th century, people figured out how to turn the image right side up using mirrors.

In 1727, Professor J.

Schulze accidentally created the first photosensitive substance when he mixed chalk, nitric acid, and silver. He saw that when this compound was exposed to sunlight, it darkened. Some years later, in 1800, a man named Thomas Wedgwood built on Schulze’s discovery. He was able to paint the nitric acid complex on leather, place an object over the paint, set it in the sun, and later have a silhouette of the object. However, it faded quickly.

In 1816, Nicéphore Niépce began experimenting with combining the camera obscura with a  photosensitive substance, bitumen of Judea. Finally, in 1826, he successfully created a permanent image on pewter plate. Niépce called this process heliography, but he died while heliography was still relatively unknown. However, before he died, Nicéphore Niépce created a partnership with Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre in 1829.

In the meantime, William Henry Fox Talbot developed negatives on paper and was able to create positives from these images in 1834.

Three years later, Daguerre developed his namesake process, Daguerreotyping. This type of photographic imaging onto silver copper plate can arguably be called the fuse that set of the obsession of photography.

Other types of photographic imaging also came into play in the mid 1800s, including calotyping from Talbot, tintypes, ferrotypes, and ambrotypes. In 1861, James Clerk-Maxwell devised the first color photography method by utilizing three different color filters. Photography with dry-plates was proposed by Richard Leach Maddox in 1871, and this was the main type of photography for a number of years.

In 1888, Kodak came out with the first camera that utilized a roll of film instead of pieces of paper or metal plates.

Now, seemingly everyone has a camera at their fingertips. Therefore, your perfect picture may be just a click away. Once you take your image, you have a wide variety of display methods available at your disposal. A long way from metal plate prints, some companies now offer the service of translating your picture from digital or film to canvas. One good source of turning your photos to canvas is YourCanvasPhotos.