A History of Photography in 50 Cameras

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Photography was invented in 1839 and changed the way the people saw the world around them. The groundbreaking tool that brought the chemistry and optics together to make photography possible was the camera. During the nineteenth century cameras were mainly owned by professionals or self-educated entrepreneurs. As the technology improved, demand grew from ordinary people for affordable cameras. No longer solely the preserve of commercial photographic studios, cameras were now designed to target new markets: children, women, the snapshooter, the amateur and the professional, alongside specialized and scientific applications such as aerial photography, military use and spying. By the 1950s, electrical features such as battery-controlled shutters and exposure processes had become the norm, leading the way for the computer-run functions in the high-spec models of the 1970s. The arrival of commercially viable digital cameras, which recorded an image on a CCD sensor rather than film from the early 1980s, transformed the camera to a fully electronic device. By the mid-2000s digital cameras were outselling film cameras, and in 2012 six times as many smartphone cameras were sold than digital cameras. This book relates the exciting story of this groundbreaking tool by selecting fifty key camera models and investigating them in chronological order. The origin and development of each model is described in detail, along with its impact on the science, consumption and art of photography. This book is an excellent resource for students of the history of photography, curators of photographic equipment and technophile photographers