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The first Photo taken
The first photo taken was by a French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It is titled View from the Window at Le Gras, taken at his family’s home. -
First photo of a person
In early 1839, French painter and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre photographs a Paris street scene from his apartment window using a camera. The first person ever captered was a man stopping for a shoeshine! -
First birds eye veiw
Felix Tournachon, better known by the nom de plume Nadar, combines his interests— aeronautics, journalism, and photography— and becomes the first to capture an aerial photograph in a tethered balloon over Paris in 1858. -
The first coloured photograph
The enormously influential Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell creates a rudimentary color image by superimposing onto a single screen three black-and-white images each passed through three filters—red, green, and blue. -
The first action photo
English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, using new emulsions that allow nearly instantaneous photography, begins taking photograph sequences that capture animals and humans in motion. -
First underwater colour photo
Ichthyologist William Longley and National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin use an Autochrome camera and a raft full of explosive magnesium flash powder to illuminate the shallows of Florida's Dry Tortugas and make the first undersea color photographs. -
First photo from space
Researchers with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory strap a 35-millimeter camera to a German V-2 missile and launch it into space from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The camera snaps a picture every second and a half as the rocket ascends to 65 miles (105 kilometers) above the surface. The camera falls back to Earth and slams into the ground, but the film, contained in a steel cassette, is unharmed. -
Thre first photo of the night sky
National Geographic teams up with the California Institute of Technology for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a seven-year project to produce the first photographic map of the Northern Hemisphere's night sky. -
The first all colour photo
After decades of pioneering color photography technology, National Geographic magazine introduces a new era in February 1962, becoming the first major American periodical to print an all-color issue. -
First Digital Still Camera
Kodak releases the first commercially available, professional digital camera in 1991. This device, extremely expensive and marketed to professional photographers, uses a Nikon F-3 camera body fitted with a digital sensor. Over the next five years, several companies come out with more affordable models, and today, the market is overwhelmed with thousands of digital still camera models.
