Say 'Cheese'!
Are you a shutterbug? This is a nickname for someone who likes to take a lot of pictures.
Early photography
People have been using cameras to record images since 1839, when a Frenchman named Louis Daguerre used chemicals to make a thin piece of silver-coated metal sensitive to light. He put the sheet in a camera and exposed it to light. Pictures taken this way, called daguerreotypes (duh-GEHR-uh-types), could take up to 40 minutes, and you could get only one image on each metal sheet.
Cameras evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries. Almost all cameras used film, a long strip of plastic material, until around 1990, when
digital cameras began to be sold.
Film had to be removed from the camera and developed, using chemicals, into photos printed on paper. Photographers might develop their own photos in a darkroom, but most people had to take the film to a store that provided developing services. Bad photos were developed right alongside the good ones, making film an expensive choice.
Modern cameras
Digital cameras are much faster: They capture the light coming into the camera and break the image up into millions of pixels, then store it as a computerized file that can be uploaded to a computer or viewed on the camera itself.
Although today people still use cameras (and some still use film), most of us use our mobile phones to take quick snapshots.
Why take pictures?
Before cameras came along, people had to draw or paint pictures of other people, places or things they wanted to record. Wealthy families paid artists to paint their portraits.
Photography offered a new way to share information with others, whether it was a family portrait or photos from a trip far away. Newspapers, books and magazines could illustrate an article to make it more interesting and understandable.
Artists began to work with different lighting, focus and exposure techniques to make unusual pieces of art. In this
1942 photograph called “The Tetons and the Snake River,” photographer Ansel Adams captured the dramatic clouds, sunlight and shadows falling over the landscape in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.