All the photography facts that are fit to post online. Okay, not ALL the photography facts. But here are 15 interesting (to me) photography facts:
- In the mid-19th century, it took as long as several hours to properly expose the film of the day. This made smiling in portraits practically impossible.
- Arguably the first-ever still camera to shoot 35mm film was made in 1905 by Jens Poul Andersen in Nellerod, Denmark.
- The first 35mm SLR camera was the Ihagee Kine Exakta, debuting in 1936 and made in Germany.
- Famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams confounded “Group f/64”, a collective of photographers in the San Francisco area circa 1930. The purpose of the collective was to “promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.”
- Between 1969 and 1972, astronauts left a dozen Hasselblad cameras on the surface of the moon. Only the film magazines were brought back to save weight for lunar rock samples.
- According to a 2013 research paper by Drew Walker and Edward Vul, “individual faces will seem more attractive when presented in a group”. This phenomenon is called “The Cheerleader Effect”.
- The human eye has an equivalent f-stop of ~ f/8.3 in well-lit conditions and ~ f/2.1 in near darkness.
- The original version of Adobe Photoshop (1.0) was first sold in February of 1990 and was only available for Apple Macintosh computers.
- In 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver nitrate darkened when exposed to light, thus paving the way for photographic film and papers (which utilize silver halide salt crystals).
- High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography was first conceived by Gustave Le Gray in the mid 1800s. Le Gray used multiple exposures of the same image and composited them into a final image.
- The original Sony Mavica, released in 1997, recorded 0.3MP images on a standard 3.5″ floppy disk and used a camcorder CCD sensor for image capture.
- If a person hires a photographer to take pictures, the photographer will own the copyright to the photographs unless there is an agreement to transfer ownership (lots more info on copyright here).
- Kodak R&D scientists developed (har-har) the first megapixel camera sensor in 1988. Ironically, Kodak pioneered the very technology they would fail to adopt quickly enough, leading to the company’s downward spiral as a leader in the photographic equipment industry.
- Canon was the first to market a “video still” camera in 1986 (similar in some ways to the Sony Mavica). The RC-701 was marketed mainly to photojournalists and had a street price of ~ $3,000 (including a 11-66mm f/1.2 lens).
- In 1999, Kyocera launched the VP-210, the world’s first mobile phone with an on-board camera capable of capturing still images and videos.
