• Blogs Home
• More Posts

Reuters, Eriko Sugita

Bill Williams

Monday, June 29th, 2026 12:49pm

June 29^th is Camera Day! You know,

? Cameras and photography have developed substantially over the years, from its early roots with the French inventor Joseph Niépce right into the modern day.

French inventor Joseph Niépce was a pioneer in the photography field and as one of the inventors of photography itself. He developed the heliograph; a technique used to produce the world’s first known photograph in 1825, the view from the window at Le Gras the family’s estate.

Fast forward to 1839, and it was Louis Jacques Daguerre took the first fixed image that didn’t fade. He is recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. Tintypes were developed in 1856 by Hamilton Smith and decades later, George Eastman invented flexible and unbreakable film that could be rolled. This was the birth of the first Kodak that was offered for sale in 1888…the first digital camera was commercially sold in December of 1989 in Japan – and a year later, the first commercially available digital camera, in the United States, was the 1990 the Dycam Model 1. It was originally a commercial failure because it was black and white, low in resolution, and cost nearly $1,000 but this changed and soon became loved by photographers. And the rest is history!