The Invention of Digital Photography

The Invention of Digital Photography

Photography has been around since the 19th century, although it was not as advanced as it is today. It is an incredibly unique art form; it has the potential to capture a moment in time unlike any other medium. What makes it even more unique is that photography has only existed for a few decades which is unlike any other medium. It has made incredible advances since the day it was discovered. In the words of Gordon Baldwin and Martin Jürgens in their book Looking At Photographs, “Cameras have undergone nearly infinite permutations, from the tiny wooden boxes built and used in the mid-1830s by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), and which her referred to as mouse-traps, to the electronic marvels of the present” (cite this). Cameras have advanced in a very short period of time from the Camera Obscura, invented by William Henery Fox Talbot to the digital camera, invented by Steven Sasson (paraphrase). The most incredible advance of photographic technology in recent history was the invention of the digital camera.

The first digital camera was invented in 1974 by a man named Steven Sasson, a research engineer who worked for Eastman Kodak. Sasson was asked by a supervisor to look at a charge-coupled device in order to see if it could be used as a sensor for a camera. It took Sasson about a year of researching before he discovered that an image captured by a camera could be converted into an electronic signal and stored onto digital memory (Bakker; Esser 45). The president of Kodak, Philip Faraci, said to the New York Times, “”The technology was half-baked, but it was a real breakthrough”” (New York Times 2). The first prototype converted light to numbers and stored them on a digital cassette tape....

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Digital photography has become the most accessible form of photography thus far. There are digital cameras everywhere; in phones, in iPods, and on computers. Digital files can be directly transferred to the internet from the same device which they were taken. In the days of the daguerreotype reproducing a print wasn’t even a possibility, each photograph could only be printed once.

Works Cited

Bakker, Jacobus G. C. and Leonard J. M. Esser. Charge-coupled Device. United States of America: Patent 3,858,232. 31 October 1989. PDF.

Baldwin, Gordon and Martin Jurgens. Looking At Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1991. Book.

Icklan, Tom. "2006 Honnors & Awards." Photographic Society of America Journal (2006): 72.

Rosenthal, Phil. "Corprate Survival Depends on Picturing How Future Will Develop ." Chicago Tribune (2012).