Digital manipulation software arrived on personal computers in 1990, which increased the popularity of digital cameras. Now images could be processed and manipulated at home without the need for costly materials or a dark room. Further information: Camera obscura An artist utilizing an 18th-century camera obscura for image tracing

Tony Ray-Jones was born in 1941 and spent his childhood in London. After an initial tenure at the London School of Printing, he moved to America to study photography at Yale University. At Yale he found that photography was taken seriously as an art form and as a tool for personal artistic expression. In America he met and took inspiration from a range of influential practitioners including designer Alexey Brodovitch and photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand. They introduced him to the then-new form of ‘street’ photography, which had a profound effect on his practise. On his return to the UK, Ray-Jones began using a similar approach to document the English at their leisure, and developed a particular interest in the English seaside. Daguerre was not the only person experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 19th century. Across the channel, English landowner, scholar and scientist William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) had produced his first successful negative, in the summer of 1835. While a small number of hand-held cameras had appeared as early as the 1850s, such cameras were extremely unusual at this time of wet collodion negatives when exposures of several seconds were the general rule. However, the introduction of far more light-sensitive, commercially manufactured gelatine dry plates in the late 1870s made ‘instantaneous’ exposures fully practical for the first time. During the 1880s, cameras designed to be used while hand-held became increasingly popular. Cameron favoured literary, historical and religious themes. Her negatives were made on large glass plates. Exposure times were long, and the resulting images have a romantic and spiritual quality. She often aimed to portray innocence, piety and wisdom through her photographs, or to depict figures and scenes from religion or literature. Cameron’s unconventional portraits usually featured her household staff, friends and family members, although she also made many distinctive portraits of prominent figures in the arts and sciences including Sir John Herschel, Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This photograph of Angelo Colarossi, a professional model hired by Cameron, makes a direct reference to literature, Iago being a character in Shakespeare’s Othello. From the beginning, inventors wanted to find a way to produce images in the colors we see as humans . While some found success in using multiple plays, others tried to find a new chemical with which they could coat the photographic plate. A relatively successful method used color filters between the lens and plate.

The digital revolution

Early in his career Steichen was associated with pictorialism and its soft focus style, although he gradually abandoned this in favour of ‘straight’ photography. Straight photography was aligned with modernism, which favoured clean lines, clear compositions and an overall sense of design and was gaining ground at the time, particularly in Europe. Thomas Sutton developed the first camera to use single-lens reflex (SLR) technology in 1861. It employed the technology used before in camera obscura devices – reflex mirrors would allow a user to look through the camera’s lens and see the exact image recorded on film. Before the development of the photography camera, it had been known for hundreds of years that some substances, such as silver salts, darkened when exposed to sunlight. [10] :4 In a series of experiments, published in 1727, the German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze demonstrated that the darkening of the salts was due to light alone, and not influenced by heat or exposure to air. [11] :7The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed in 1777 that silver chloride was especially susceptible to darkening from light exposure, and that once darkened, it becomes insoluble in an ammonia solution. [11] The first person to use this chemistry to create images was Thomas Wedgwood. [10] To create images, Wedgwood placed items, such as leaves and insect wings, on ceramic pots coated with silver nitrate, and exposed the set-up to light. These images weren't permanent, however, as Wedgwood didn't employ a fixing mechanism. He ultimately failed at his goal of using the process to create fixed images created by a camera obscura. [11] :8 View from the Window at Le Gras (1826), the earliest surviving photograph [10] :3–5

Ultimately, that’s the biggest issue. Someone posted something false for whatever reason, and people allowed their worldview to be immediately altered with zero evidence. Journalistic institutions then covered the situation, parroting lies, thereby spreading misinformation to even more people. Only some of the persuaded readers will ever see the official statement from the Department for Transport, disabusing them of the lie. In 1861, James Clerk Maxwell produced the first colour photograph. He captured an image of some tartan ribbon. His technique involved photographing the ribbon through red, yellow and blue filters, then combining those separate images into one. The Kodak camera revolutionised the photographic market with its simplicity of use and freedom from the mess of darkroom chemistry. It marked the beginning of photography as a tool and hobby for everyone. Widely regarded as the first photographs of inner city slums, Annan’s photographs were indicative of a growing public concern for the poor and dispossessed in society.

Explore our most popular collections

You can read more about the British Empire and how it changed the world, in our British Empire facts. Camera bellows may be somewhat unusual these days, but companies such as Intrepid Camera, which is based in Brighton, UK, still make large-format view cameras with bellows.