Photography was first invented in the early 1800’s, and in the time since then, it’s become the world’s most powerful visual medium. Photographs are a part of our daily lives in today’s era, and we often take for granted just how powerful it is to capture a moment forever whenever we want – and it’s something that our ancestors experimented with a lot when it first came out.

These are some of the firsts of early photography, when the technology was still extremely primitive and difficult to use. Nonetheless, they show an interesting view into the lives of the people who developed the early invention, and how it evolved into the medium that we know and use today – especially in a time where our modern smart phones can take crystal clear pictures one moment and then let us play real money slots Canada has to offer in another.

1. The First Photograph Ever

Joseph Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in history in 1826. He took the picture from an upstairs window of his estate in the Burgundy region of France, and was captured by through a process known as heliography. In essence, this processed used Bitumen of Judea, which was coated on to a piece of glass or metal, and the Bitumen would harden in proportion to the light that was coming through the lens.

2. The First Colour Photograph

A mathematical physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, took this some years later in 1861. Maxwell is credited with the process that made the picture possible, but the photo itself was taken by the inventor of the SLR, Thomas Sutton. The picture is of a bow that contains three different, identifiable colours.

3. The First Digital Photograph

Taken in 1957, the first digital picture actually predates the first digital camera by around 20 years before Kodak released their line of digital cameras. The photograph is the digitally rendered scan of shot that was taken from a film, and depicts the son of Russell Kirsch and has a resolution of 176×176.

4. The First Photo of a Human

Taken by Frenchman Louis Dugerre, the landscape picture shows Boulevard du Temple, a thoroughfare in the city of Paris. Inadvertently, Dugerre’s seven-minute exposure shot captured a man walking past on the street below, who was the first human to be ever put on still-media. Upon closer inspection, it’s revealed that there are, in fact, more than a few people in the picture.

5. The First Space Photo

This picture was taken by V-2 rocket number 13, which was first launched on October 24^th, 1946. The photo itself shows a small portion of the earth in black and white, and was taken at an altitude of 104 kilometres in the atmosphere. The camera used was a 35mm motion picture camera that snapped a photo around every second and a half as the rocket climbed into the Earth’s atmosphere, making it a lesser known but still extremely important historical picture, especially for the time.