Considered one of the best camera makers today, Hasselblad got its start as a trading company in 1841. By 1888, the company’s founder had met with and become good friends with George Eastman, one of the founders of Kodak. The relationship grew, and Hasselblad became the only distributor of Kodak...

The wet plate negative was invented in 1851 by an English sculptor by the name of Frederick Scoff Archer. The process involved using a viscous solution that contained collodion. Glass plates with light-sensitive silver salts were coated with the solution, which were then developed in a darkroom....

In 1917, Nippon Kogaku K.K. was formed. The new company, which merged three previously independent optical firms, began making fine optics, including microscopes and telescopes. But, as time went on, Nippon Kogaku became increasingly involved in making camera lenses, the first of which debuted in...

The first mobile phones equipped with a camera became available in the early 2000s. Samsung's SCH-V200 phone was released in 2000 in South Korea. Sharp’s J-SH04 came several months later but was only available in Japan. Phones with integrated cameras were introduced two years later. The Sanyo...

From 1861-1865, Mathew Brady and his staff documented the Civil War. Brady, who was one of the first American photographers, began his documentation of the conflict by specializing in taking portraits of soldiers before they left for battle. However, he soon became more interested in documenting...

Remember those iconic images of the moon and earth from the lunar missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Some of those images were taken with Hasselblad cameras, which were then left on the surface of the moon. There are twelve cameras in all that were left behind so that astronauts could...

In 1959, Nikon introduced its F camera system, the company’s first SLR. It was the first camera to incorporate many modern functionalities into a single camera, including a depth of field preview button, mirror lockup, and flash synchronization capabilities. It was also the first SLR camera...

This Week in Photography History During the Cold War, the U.S. government didn’t have the benefit of digital cameras to conduct their spying on the U.S.S.R. The solution? The U.S. launched 20 satellites into orbit, each containing 60 miles of film. Once the film was used up, it was ejected from...