Film | Cameras | Lenses | Lighting

A Brief History of Cameras

Today’s cameras all derive from the 16th-century camera obscura. The earliest form of this device was a darkened room with a tiny hole in one wall. Light entered the room through this hole and projected an upside-down image of the subject onto the opposite wall. Over the course of three centuries the camera obscura evolved into a handheld box with a lens replacing the pinhole and an angled mirror at the back. The mirror reflected an image onto a ground-glass viewing screen on the top of the box. Long before film was invented artists used this device to help them draw more accurately. They placed thin paper onto the viewing screen and could easily trace the reflected image.

The inventors of photography in the early 19th century adapted the camera obscura by adding a device for holding sensitized plates in the back of the box. This kind of camera, with some improvements, was used throughout the 19th century. One notable enhancement for the box, pleated leather sides called bellows, allowed the photographer to easily adjust the distance between the lens and the plane of focus. Professional photographers still use a similar camera today, a large-format camera known as the view camera.

In the 1880s the invention of more sensitive emulsions and better lenses led to the development of lens shutters, devices that could limit the time of exposure to a fraction of a second. At first the shutter was simply a blind dropped in front of the lens by the force of gravity, or by a spring. Later designs featured a set of blades just behind the optical lens. In 1888 George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera, which used a cylindrical shutter that the photographer turned by pulling a string on the front of the camera. The Kodak was one of the earliest handheld cameras. It made photography available to amateurs for the first time and created a snapshot craze at the turn of the 20th century.

In 1925 the Leitz Company in Germany introduced the Leica, one of the first cameras to use 35-millimeter film, a small-sized film initially designed for motion pictures. Because of its compactness and economy, the Leica and other 35-millimeter cameras became popular with both amateur and professional photographers. All but the earliest Leicas used a focal-plane shutter, located just in front of the film. Because it blocks light from the film even when the lens is removed, the focal-plane shutter allows photographers to switch lenses safely in the middle of a film roll.

Next: Modern Camera Types