One common explanation for the lack of smiles in old photos is that long exposure times — the time a camera needs to take a picture — made it important for the subject of a picture to stay as still as possible. That way, the picture wouldn’t look blurry. Yet smiles were still uncommon in the early part of the century.

Kodak

Willy

Raghu Rai

The photo, taken by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827, captures the view outside his window in Burgundy. He snapped the shot with a camera obscura by focusing it onto a pewter plate, with the whole process taking him about eight hours.

The first camera was essentially a room with a small hole on one side wall. Light would pass through that hole, and since it’s reflected in straight lines, the image would be projected on the opposite wall, upside down.

The world’s first photograph—or at least the oldest surviving photo—was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. Captured using a technique known as heliography, the shot was taken from an upstairs window at Niépce’s estate in Burgundy.

How are an eye and a camera similar? An eye and a camera both have lenses and light-sensitive surfaces. Your iris controls how much light enters your eye. Your lens helps focus the light.

Johann Zahn designed the first camera in 1685. But the first photograph was clicked by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in the year 1814. It was thousands of years back that an Iraqi scientist Ibn- al- Haytham made a mention of this kind of a device in his book, Book of Optics in 1021.

“The camera is arguably one of the most important of all inventions… it is the single tool that has the ability to stop time, record history, generate art, tell stories, and communicate messages that transcend language like nothing else ever conceived.”