The first photograph took hours
The oldest surviving photograph taken from nature was made by Nicéphore Niépce around 1826, looking out of an upstairs window of his house in France. The EXPOSURE lasted at least eight hours, and possibly several days. The sun moved across the sky during it, so the buildings are lit from both sides at once.
Early portraits needed people to hold perfectly still for many seconds, sometimes with a hidden metal stand behind the head to keep it steady. That, as much as fashion, is why so few people smile in old photographs: a smile is hard to hold without it turning into a grimace. Saying cheese to make a quick grin only caught on once cameras got fast.
Three settings decide every picture
How bright a photo comes out depends on three things. The APERTURE is the hole in the LENS that lets light in, and it works like the pupil of an eye. Confusingly, its size is given as an f-number where a smaller number means a bigger hole. A wide aperture also blurs the background, so a PORTRAIT often shows its SUBJECT sharp against a soft backdrop.
The SHUTTER speed is how long the light is let in. A thousandth of a second freezes a football mid-air; a slow shutter on a TRIPOD turns car headlights into streaks. The third setting is how sensitive the sensor is to light. Turning one up means turning another down, and learning to balance them is the first real skill in photography.
You press the button, we do the rest
That was Kodak's slogan in 1888, when it sold a simple box CAMERA already loaded with film for a hundred pictures. When the film was used up, the owner posted the whole camera back to the factory, which developed the prints and returned the camera reloaded. Photography suddenly needed no chemistry at home and no DARKROOM, and the family SNAPSHOT and the photo ALBUM were born.
Film recorded a NEGATIVE, an image with light and dark reversed, which was then printed onto paper. Among the earliest photographs of a person is a self-portrait taken in 1839 by Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia, which makes the SELFIE nearly as old as photography. The word itself was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2013.
The first digital camera used a cassette tape
In 1975 a Kodak engineer, Steven Sasson, built the first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, captured black-and-white images of 0.01 megapixels — ten thousand PIXEL dots — and took 23 seconds to record each one onto a cassette tape. Kodak, which made its money selling film, did little with it, and the company it could have become was built by others; Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
The rest of the grid covers the kit and the craft: the VIEWFINDER you look through, ZOOM and TELEPHOTO lenses for faraway things, MACRO lenses for tiny ones, FOCUS, the FLASH, a FILTER, the STUDIO with its LIGHTING, and the FRAME. Our gadgets page covers the phone that now does most of it.