Through the
Lens — A Blog
About Photography

French inventor Nicéphore Niépce captured the world's first surviving photograph in 1826 — an eight-hour exposure of rooftops. Louis Daguerre refined the process into the daguerreotype by 1839, producing sharp, detailed images on silver-coated copper plates. Photography was born, and the world would never be the same.

The collodion wet plate process (1851) dramatically reduced exposure times and made photography more accessible. Photographers could now capture moving subjects and produce multiple prints from a single glass negative. By the 1870s, dry plates replaced the cumbersome wet process, allowing cameras to leave the studio for the first time.

George Eastman's introduction of roll film and the first Kodak camera in 1888 democratised photography. His slogan "You press the button, we do the rest" put cameras in the hands of ordinary people for the first time. The 1930s saw the arrival of 35mm Leica and Contax cameras, pioneering candid street and reportage photography.

Magazines like Life and National Geographic defined the mid-century with iconic photojournalism. Masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks elevated photography to high art. Colour film became widely available in the 1960s, and the SLR camera revolution gave photographers unprecedented creative control.

Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented the first digital camera in 1975 — it captured a 0.01-megapixel image on a cassette tape. By the 1990s, digital cameras began entering the consumer market. The Nikon D1 (1999) became the first professional digital SLR to see widespread photojournalistic use, signalling the end of film's dominance.

Canon's EOS 300D (2003) brought professional-quality digital photography to the masses at under $1,000. By 2008, the iPhone had a camera, and within a decade smartphones were producing images that rivalled entry-level DSLRs. The mirrorless revolution (Olympus E-P1, 2009; Sony A7, 2013) began displacing the optical viewfinder entirely.

Today's cameras feature AI-powered subject tracking, in-sensor stabilisation and computational stacking that would have seemed science fiction a decade ago. Smartphones compute dozens of images simultaneously to produce a single shot. AI editing tools in Adobe, Luminar and Capture One automate tasks that once took hours. Yet alongside this technological revolution, film photography is quietly enjoying a global renaissance — proof that the medium's soul endures beyond its tools.