"Photography" is derived from the Greek words photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw")

1. The word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material. "Photography" is derived from the Greek words photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw")

2. camera obscura the camera obscura developed out of the simple, lens-less 'pinhole camera' which was used, perhaps a 1,000 years ago, to project an image of the sun and safely view eclipses. The incorporation of a lens in the seventeenth century (or maybe even earlier) produced a much brighter image and the camera obscura, as we know it today, was born.

3. Photography as a useable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. However, the picture took eight hours to expose, so he went about trying to find a new process. Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph, c. 1826. This image required an eight-hour exposure, which resulted in sunlight being visible on both sides of the buildings.

4. Daguerreotypes Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. First daguerreotype Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the development of the daguerreotype in 1839, reducing the exposure time down to half an hour.

5. The low-cost daguerreotype became so popular that, by the end of 1839, Paris newspapers were referring to a new disease called Daguerreotypomania. People were by far the most common photographic subject of the 19th century. Photographic portraits were much less expensive than painted ones, took less of the sitter’s time, and described individual faces with uncanny accuracy. So great was the sense of presence in these pictures that photographers were often called on to take portraits of the recently deceased, a genre now known as postmortem portraits.

6. Different, and in a sense a rival to the Daguerreotype, was the Calotype invented by William Henry Fox Talbot, which was to provide the answer to that problem. the calotype negative provided the first practical method of producing prints on paper from a camera exposure

7. Interest in daguerreotypes dwindled in Europe after 1851, when English photographer Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion, or wet-plate process. This was a negative-to-positive process, but because the negatives were made of smooth glass rather than paper, the collodion process produced much sharper images.

8. Photographers using the collodion, or wet-plate, process hauled their large cameras, tripods, and portable darkrooms to the farthest reaches of Europe’s imperial quest in the years between 1850 and 1870.

9. The Civil War in the United States (1861-1865) was the first war to be thoroughly recorded by photography Matthew Brady

10. As industrialization came to define Western life in the 19th century, industry employed photography to portray its successes and strengths. For example, in 1857 British photographer Robert Howlett took pictures of the British steamship Great Eastern, the largest vessel of its day.

11. In addition to recording the construction of railroads, ships, buildings, and bridges, photography proved useful to medicine and the social sciences Doctors wanted before-and-after pictures of wounded Civil War soldiers to study the effects of amputation and invasive surgery…

12. Psychologists studied photographs of mental patients in an attempt to visually discern their disorders. Photographers recorded the features of criminals, not only as a means of identification, but also in an effort to identify physical characteristics, which criminologists then believed might correspond with criminal behaviour.

13. The development of faster cameras in the 1870s spurred scientists and others to use photography in the study of human and animal movement. In 1878 Muybridge used a series of photographs of a galloping horse to demonstrate to the world that the animal lifts all four feet off the ground at once.

14. In the last quarter of the 19th century the camera helped record the plight of the dispossessed, displaced, and overlooked. One of the earliest attempts to document urban poverty was made by Scottish photographer Thomas Annan, who aimed his camera at the empty, unsanitary alleyways of Glasgow in 1868 City officials commissioned Annan’s documentation to justify replacement of Glasgow’s unsavory slums with new development.

15. The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer. In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s. The Kodak came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures and needed to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished.

16. The snapshot expanded photography’s territory to include casual family scenes, candid views of everyday life, and instantaneous images that stopped motion in midair. The photographs of Frenchman Jacques Henri Lartigue, who began taking snapshots at the age of six, best exemplify this. In this snapshot, taken when he was ten, his teenage cousin appears suspended over a flight of stairs, miraculously posing for the camera in the middle of her flying leap. The Snapshot Originally a hunting term for shooting from the hip

17. As early as 1905, Oscar Barnack had the idea of reducing the format of negatives and then enlarging the photographs after they had been exposed. As development manager at Leica, he was able to put his theory into practice. He took an instrument for taking exposure samples for cinema film and turned it into the world's first 35 mm camera: the 'Ur-Leica'. 35mm

18. One example of the new visual culture provided by photomechanical reproduction is the birth of picture magazines, so called because their contents were defined as much by photographs as by text. National Geographic magazine became hugely popular because of it’s exotic photographs from around the world. It was one of the first publications to use colour photography. traditional butter making in the Palestine, from March 1914 National Geographic

19. Fashion photography developed along with the new picture magazines. Confined at first to studio portraits of society women in their finery, it turned to professional models and professional photographers to enliven images and entice the reader. Cecil Beaton

20. The new approach to photography in the editorial content of magazines was matched by an increasingly sophisticated use of photography in advertisements. Steichen. Steinway & Sons piano advertisement [Mother & son]

21. In Paris, surrealists such as American expatriate Man Ray saw photography as an avenue into the subconscious or into a world beyond reality.

22. Digital Photography Digital camera technology is directly related to and evolved from the same technology that recorded television images. In 1986, Kodak scientists invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print. APPLE QUICK TAKE 100 .1994.  The first mass-market color digital camera.  640 x 480 pixel CCD.  Up to eight 640 x 480 resolution images could be stored in internal memory

23. Digital Manipulation of Images Doctoring photographs has been around almost as long as photography itself, but as digital imaging hardware and software has both advanced and come down in price, the practice of digital image manipulation has become much more commonplace and faked photos are becoming harder to detect. In fact, digital photo manipulation -- commonly referred to as 'photoshopping' -- has recently become a popular pastime, and many consider this photographic fakery to be a new art form.

24. Today photography remains a vital and inextricable part of contemporary art, as well as retaining its commercial and more everyday uses. The invention of various digital means of making, altering, and transmitting images has thus far failed to curtail interest in traditional methods of picture making. Nor has such technology lessened the faith most people have in the documentary truth of photographs. Cindy Sherman