History of Photography Quiz

Nicephore Niepce made the earliest surviving photograph around 1826 or 1827, using an eight-hour exposure on a pewter plate coated with bitumen. His later collaboration with Daguerre led directly to the first practical photographic process.

A daguerreotype was a unique, non-reproducible image formed directly on a silver-coated copper plate. Unlike the negative-positive process that followed, there was no intermediate negative and no way to make duplicate prints from the same plate.

George Eastman founded Kodak in the 1880s and introduced roll film and simple box cameras that made photography accessible to non-specialists for the first time. His slogan, you press the button we do the rest, summarised the shift from technical craft to consumer activity.

Camera obscura is Latin for dark room or dark chamber. The device projected an inverted image of the outside world through a small opening onto the opposite wall, and was used by artists and astronomers centuries before photography existed.

Henri Cartier-Bresson articulated the idea that the perfect photograph occurs at one specific instant when geometry, light, and meaning align. His concept of the decisive moment became a guiding principle of street and photojournalistic photography.

Color in photography is powerful because it carries mood and emotion. Warm colors advance and energize; cool colors recede and calm. Controlling and balancing color in your image is a key tool for directing how the viewer feels.

The Brownie, introduced by Kodak around 1900, was inexpensive enough for ordinary households to afford and simple enough for children to use. It made personal photography a mass activity and established the snapshot as a cultural form.

Edwin Land founded Polaroid and developed the instant film process that produced a finished print within minutes of exposure. The technology eliminated the need for a darkroom and made amateur photography faster and more social.

A Kodak engineer built the first self-contained digital camera in 1975. It captured a 0.01 megapixel image onto a cassette tape and took 23 seconds to record, but it demonstrated that electronic image capture without film was physically possible.

The wet plate collodion process coated a glass or metal plate with a light-sensitive chemical that had to be exposed and developed while still moist, giving the photographer only a few minutes between coating and development. The entire darkroom had to travel with the camera.