DAY 332

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Digital Photography

OLDER THAN YOU THINK

While we tend to think of digital photography as a distinctly late-20^th century innovation, its roots actually go back to the 1950s.

In 1957, Russell Kirsch, working for the U.S. government, created what today we would call a scanner and produced the first digital image by scanning a 5cm × 5cm photograph onto a computer. In the 1960s, NASA used digital signals to map the surface of the moon, and, in processing them later, essentially created digital-photography editing. Then came the “charged-coupled device” in 1969 (or CCD as it is commonly known), which gauges the color and intensity of light, a device that all digital cameras now have.

Advances continued through the ’90s in both CCD image sensor technology (that could capture and encode visual information known as “pixels” digitally) and storage formats for the images once they were captured. By the mid ’80s and early ’90s, digital photography was becoming more and more possible, but costs were prohibitive and software was still in its infancy. In this era, the camera sensors were capable of picking up 600 to 720,000 pixels—cameras of today can record as much as 6 megapixels.

By the late ’90s, the first affordable user-friendly models started to hit the market. By 2002, sales of digital cameras, with features that allowed photographers to store, edit, and email pictures using a home computer, surpassed sales of film cameras. —DJG