Camera

A camera is a device that records an image by focusing light onto a light-sensitive surface, which may be a chemically coated plate or film or an electronic sensor. The idea began with the camera obscura, a darkened chamber that projects a scene through a small opening, and it became photography in the 1820s and 1830s. Credit for the invention is shared among several people in France and Britain.

History of the camera

The camera obscura was known long before photography, but it could only show a fleeting image. The challenge was to make the image permanent. Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who came from a prominent family in Burgundy in France, began work on that problem at his family estate and, in 1816, produced legible but fleeting camera pictures that he called points de vue.

In 1827 Niepce made the image now known as the Niepce Heliograph. According to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, he coated a polished pewter plate with light-sensitive bitumen dissolved in oil of lavender, placed the plate in a camera obscura near a window, and exposed it to sunlight for several days. The result recorded the courtyard, outbuildings and trees outside his workroom. It is the earliest surviving photograph made with the aid of a camera obscura.

Niepce described the process in December 1827 as a first uncertain step in a completely new direction. In 1829 he formed a partnership with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, who ran the Diorama, a popular Paris entertainment. Niepce died in 1833, and Daguerre kept improving the process and introduced his daguerreotype in 1839.

Inventor and origins of the camera

No single person invented the camera or photography. The Harry Ransom Center notes that the invention of photography was announced simultaneously in France and England in 1839, and that it depended on centuries of developments in chemistry, optics and the visual arts.

In France, Niepce and Daguerre produced the heliograph and the daguerreotype. In Britain, William Henry Fox Talbot developed the calotype, a different process that made a negative from which many prints could be made. The Royal Photographic Society records that a group of keen experimenters formed the Edinburgh Calotype Club in 1843.

Disputes continued over rights. In March 1851 Frederick Scott Archer published his collodion process, which used collodion on glass to carry the light-sensitive chemicals. It was not protected by a patent, so amateurs and commercial studios could use it freely. Talbot claimed that his 1843 calotype patent covered Archer’s method, but the courts dismissed the claim in 1854.

How a camera works

All cameras share a few basic parts. A lens gathers light from a scene and focuses it. An opening, called the aperture, and a shutter control how much light reaches the recording surface and for how long. The surface itself records the result.

Early cameras needed very long exposures. Niepce’s plate was exposed for several days, and later processes shortened the time dramatically. Film and plates record light through chemical change in a coating, which is later developed into a visible image.

Digital cameras use an electronic sensor instead. The Nobel Foundation states that Willard Boyle and George Smith shared half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit, the CCD sensor. A sensor of this kind turns light into electrical charge in a grid of tiny elements, and electronics then convert the charge into a stored image. A semiconductor is the material that makes this conversion possible.

Types of cameras

The camera obscura and plate cameras were the first types. The daguerreotype camera recorded an image on a metal plate, and later wet and dry glass plates made photography faster and cheaper.

George Eastman began manufacturing dry plates commercially in 1880 and formed the Eastman Dry Plate Company with Henry Strong in 1881. In 1888 he put the first simple camera into the hands of consumers, with the slogan that the customer pressed the button and the company did the rest. In 1889 he marketed the first commercial transparent roll film, which Kodak says enabled Thomas Edison to develop the first motion picture camera.

Today the main divisions are film cameras, motion picture cameras and digital cameras. Digital cameras are built into phones, laptops and many other devices, and they differ from film cameras mainly in how the image is recorded and stored.

Impact of the camera

Eastman’s aim was to make photography as convenient as the pencil. His simple camera and roll film turned a cumbersome, complicated process into one that nearly everyone could use, which is why photography moved from specialists to the general public.

Photography also gained recognition as both art and science. At the Great Exhibition in London, which ran from 1 May to 15 October 1851 and drew more than 6 million visitors, over 700 photographs were shown as fine art and as a branch of science. Photographic societies formed within a few years of the 1839 announcement, and the Royal Photographic Society has existed continuously since its foundation.

Roll film also gave rise to cinema, since motion pictures are a rapid series of photographs. The history of photography and the history of the camera are therefore closely linked.

Uses of cameras today

Cameras are used in science, medicine, journalism, industry, security and everyday life. Sensors like the CCD record images that scientists use to study everything from cells to distant galaxies, and the same kind of imaging underpins computer vision, in which software analyzes pictures.

Film remains in use among artists and enthusiasts, but digital sensors now record most images. The conversion from chemical to electronic recording changed how pictures are stored, shared and edited, though the optical principle of focusing light with a lens is the same as in Niepce’s camera obscura.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue