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Facts, Tips, & Trivia
Interesting facts, beyond the Shoebox!
  • BBC news reports in August, 2009, that The Impossible Project is moving ahead on inventing their own Polaroid-type film.
  • After 74 years, Kodak announces on June 22, 2009, that it will discontinue production of its Kodachrome film.
  • Polaroid started selling the PoGo in March of 2009, an instant digital camera with built-in selective printing—it weighs 10 ounces and will sell for $200, with paper packs (30 sheets) for $12.99.
  • In 2008, U.S. consumers made 19.7 billion prints from digital photos.
  • Leica announced, in September of 2008, a forthcoming 35mm-sized DSLR, the S2, with a 37.5 megapixel sensor that is 56% bigger than full frame, at 30 x 45mm.
  • In October of 2008, a Flickr discussion was started asking how many photos people had taken that year—the high count is 50,000.
  • 40 million digital cameras were sold in the U.S. in 2008.
  • In 2007, U.S. consumers made 18 billion prints from digital photos.
  • In 2006, U.S. consumers made 12 billion prints from digital photos.
  • Microsoft began putting the pieces together on their Photosynth project in 2006, technology that makes 3D environments out of tens or hundreds of digital still images.
  • In 2005, 24.7 million digital cameras were sold to consumers in the U.S.
  • In 2004, 24% of all phones sold in the U.S. and 90% sold in Japan were camera phones.
  • Journalist John C. Dvorak claimed in 2004, “I do think that many of our memories locked in photos will be lost to time, but not as a result of deterioration. It will be because of the sheer enormity of the photo load on humankind. Cameras on phones. Moblogs. Picture storage sites. Sixty-million new digital cameras sold this year alone [worldwide]. Endless images taken by everyone. Duplicates, and duplicates of duplicates! The number of digital images will be in the trillions in no time. That is how they will be lost.” (PC Magazine, July, 2004.)
  • In 2000, the average U.S. household shot 7 rolls of film, or about 170 photos, per year. (According to the Photo Marketing Association (PMA)—from “Photo Generation,” by Karina Bland, Arizona Republic, 12/7/2007.)
  • The peak of film sales was in 1999 when 800 million rolls of film were sold and 25 billion images were captured and printed.
  • As the internet boomed, online digital printing was born in the late 1990s.
  • In 1996, Canon offers its first compact digital camera to consumers, the PowerShot 600.
  • In 1991, Kodak introduced the Kodak Digital Camera System (DCS), a way to equip a Nikon F-3 film camera with a 1.3 megapixel Kodak sensor.
  • Thomas and John Knoll started working on what would become Photoshop in 1987—Photoshop 1.0 was shipped in 1990.
  • The 1980s saw the evolution of the one-hour photo lab.
  • The first digital camera was built in 1975 by electrical engineer Steven J. Sasson at Eastman Kodak.
  • The first digital image was created in 1957 when Russel Kirsch and colleagues at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)), scanned an image of his son into the first programmable computer in the U.S., the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC).
  • The first Polaroid camera debuted in 1947, weighed five pounds and sold for $89.75—film was $1.75 for eight sepia-toned exposures.
  • In 1938, artist Barbara Morgan presaged Photoshop by writing, “Until there is more effective equipment for fusing images photomontage cannot reach the stature that it should inevitably reach... I believe the that increasingly the pressure for [photomontage] will force designers to evolve better ways of producing the non-realistic multiple image. It stands before us a great undeveloped potential in photography.” (Photography 1900 to the Present, [compiled by] Diana Emery Hulick with Joseph Marshall, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1998, pp. 84-86.)
  • Though the first color photograph was created by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, Kodachrome was introduced in 1937 and is considered the first commercially available color roll film for amateur and professional photographers—invented by Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr., with the Eastman Kodak Company.
  • The first 35mm camera, the Leica, was introduced in 1914 and marketed in 1924—originally an exposure checking device for movie cameras, the Leica became the first portable and durable camera that was eventually embraced by emerging photojournalists and art photographers.
  • In 1889 Henry Reichenbach and George Eastman produced a transparent, flexible roll film substitute for the paper film base found in the Kodak camera (which was introduced in 1888 with the slogan “You press the button—we do the rest”).
  • In November 1883, The New York Times published an article called “Taking Pictures For Fun: The Increasing Army of Amateur Photographers.”
  • The New York Times’ “Art Notes” of 1881 reported that Mr. E. Anthony of Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin claimed, “The advances now in progress and impending are as extraordinary as anything in the past. The gelatin dry plate is rapidly being adopted by all progressive photographers, and will soon take the place of collodion plates [a wet process] everywhere...We look confidently forward to the time when evening meetings will be photographed instantaneously by gas-light, and we think it not too much to say that thrilling scenes on the stage will be instantaneously photographed and prints ready for delivery to the audience before the play is ended.”
  • In 1840 Hippolyte Bayard portrayed himself dead in “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man” in response to the politically driven suppression of news of his photographic experiments and exhibitions (late 1830s) in France (mainly by François Arago (see below)).
  • The invention of the daguerreotype was presented at the 1839 joint meeting of the Academies of Sciences and Fine Arts in Paris, France, by astronomer and member of the French Chamber of Deputies, François Arago, with inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s by his side (Daguerre had originally collaborated with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce on the invention until Niépce’s death in 1833).
  • William Henry Fox Talbot created the earliest known photographic negative still in existence on chemically treated paper in 1835—a tiny image depicting a window of his home, Lacock Abbey—he reported his findings publicly (later patented as the calotype and also referred to as a Talbotype in 1841) after word spread about the invention of the daguerreotype.
  • As early as 1832, French emigrant to Brazil and amateur scientist, artist, and naturalist, Hercules Florence, carried out photographic experiments using silver salts, ammonia, and the camera obscura.
  • The first photograph still in existence is considered to be “The View From the Window at Le Gras,” created in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
  • Sir John Herschel published a paper on chemical and photographic processes in 1819, which included a description of hyposulfite of soda on silver salts (“hypo”) and its fixative qualities—Herschel is also likely responsible for coining the terms positive, negative, and photography (for light writing, also used by Hercules Florence and by German astronomer Johann H. von Maedler).