Hey, can you take my picture?
This is a question that wasn’t always thrown around so casually; after all, there used to be a lot more involved in capturing an image than just the simple push of a button that it is nowadays. For a very long time, the request to immortalize your image
demanded the skill of an oil painter and carefully still patience from you. And even after the birth of photographic technology, the task still demanded that the subject of a picture remain quite still for quite a long time.
It may be a surprise to find out that the history of the camera goes back all the way to the days of the ancient Greeks (or possibly even further back than that!) with the Camera Obscura. It was Aristotle who first recorded a natural phenomenon he noticed in which images appear inverted when cast through a tiny hole into darkened enclosures. This natural phenomenon, the Camera Obscura, has been a point of interest for many years.
Announcements of photographic technology weren’t made public until 1839, however, a French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce began experimenting with photography out of his own personal interests in 1816.
It was an entire decade later that he was able to produce the first semi-successful photograph. He coated a piece of paper with sliver chloride to use for the photograph. In the chemistry world, silver chloride is known for its crafty conversion to silver when illuminated or exposed to heat. It darkens when exposed to light. He placed the pape
r in his darkened enclosure and…voila…. As you can see in this shot outside his window, the results needed some improvements.
Before Mr. Niépce, could produce crisper results from his photographic experiments, a new process came along called daguerreotypy that took just as much effort and time to produce an image, but it did so with much more clarity and the subjects of photographs only had to sit still for a maximum of five minutes but as little as half a minute. This method only lasted about 15 years, however, until it was outdated by newer, cheaper processes that produced even clearer and more readily-viewable pictures.
Starting as a low-tech wooden box with a hole in it, what have come to be known as cameras transformed into ‘handheld’ picture-taking computers! From disposable to digital, 
you can find great cameras for your summer adventures right here at Everything Summer Camp. Treasure your camp memories forever in our fantastic Three Cheers Photo Book or the appropriate Summer Camp Photo Frame. Check it all out right here and, as always, thanks for reading!
- John