By Duy Pham

View from the Window at Le Gras, taken by Nicphore Nipce (using paper with silver chloride) at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes around 1826-1827, shows buildings surrounding
the photographers estate, Le Gras, as seen from a high window.

Nipce, photographer of the original photograph, teamed up with Louis Daguerre to refine the

bitumen process. Nipce unfortunately died in 1833, leaving his work to Daguerre. Daguerre was more interested in the silver-based process than Nipce had been, so he experimented with photographing images onto silver-surfaced plates fumed with iodine vapor. L'Atelier de l'artiste, photographed by Daguerre in 1837 is known to be the first image to complete Daguerres process

Louis Daguerre then named his photography process, the Daguerreotype process, and introduced it in 1839, where it became the first publicly announced photography process and to come into widespread use. Boulevard de Temple (below), photographed by Louis Daguerre in 1938, is generally accepted to be the earliest surviving photograph to include people in it.

After reading about Daguerres process, William Henry Fox Talbot, who had succeeded in creating photographic negatives on paper in 1835, started working on perfecting his own photographic process. Talbots silver-chloride experiments required a camera exposure of at least one hour. He then invented the Calotype process in 1840, which used the principle of chemical development on images, much like Daguerres process.

In 1847, Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky designed a camera which significantly improved the focusing process. In Paris, Levitsky became the first photographer to introduce interchangeable decorative backgrounds in his photos and also the retouching of negatives to reduce technical difficulties. Levitsky also became the first photographer to portray his subjects in different poses and themes. In 1851, Levitsky won the first gold medal ever awarded for a portrait photograph.

The Tartan Ribbon, taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861 for a lecture by James Clark Maxwell (who proposed the method), is known to be the first permanent color photograph. Three separate Black-and-White photos were taken of a multicolored ribbon, which were then taken through RGB filters. The three images were then superimposed on a screen using three projectors equipped with similar filters.

In 1884, George Eastman developed dry gel on film to replace the photographic plate so photographers no longer needed to carry loads of toxic chemicals and plates around In July 1888, Eastmans Kodak camera was released onto the market In 1901, the Kodak Brownie was introduced, making photography available for massmarketing

Eastman introduced the Kodachrome film in 1935, which became available for 16mm home movies and 35mm slides in 1936. The film captured the RGB color components in three separate emulsion layers

In 1973, Fairchild Semiconductor released the first image forming CCD chip The first recorded attempt to build a digital camera was in 1975 by Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, using the same CCD chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor The first commercially available digital camera was the 1990 Dycam Model 1, which also sold as the Logitech Fotoman

Early uses of Digital Photography were mainly for military and scientific purposes. During the mid to late 1990s, Digital Cameras became popular and common among customers. By the mid-2000s, Film Cameras were heavily replaced by Digital Cameras, and Digital Cameras also began being integrated into Cell phones. By the beginning of the 2010s, smartphones began integrating Digital Cameras