We cannot have everything placed in our hands. We must pursue our dreams. There have been countless inspiring and successful photographers who have built a reputation for themselves, and you could be the next.
Let us now look at the history of digital photography. An Iraqi scientist invented the earliest camera in recorded history, known as the camera obscura, in the early 11th century. The first surviving photograph was taken in 1826 by a Frenchman called Thomas Nicéphore Niépce, who used a portable camera obscura to capture the iconic image known as "View from the Window at Le Gras (Mueller, 2021)."
It would be nearly 150 years after Niépce's photograph before digital cameras were invented. During that time, the field of photography progressed and evolved, transitioning from a highly technical profession that required substantial training to master to something that anybody with the correct tools could accomplish anywhere. Digital photography took this a step further, enhancing the craft for pros while also making high-quality images available to the general public.
So, how did we arrive here?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to capture stunning digital photographs, but it did take one to get us here. Eugene F. Lally of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pioneered digital photography in 1961 by attempting to convert light signals so that astronauts could take clearer photos and better determine their position in space.
At the time, and for many decades after, photography was done on film, which was an efficient procedure but did not provide the immediate results that Lally desired. Unfortunately for Lally, the first filmless camera would not be produced for another fifteen years, but his early speculations aided in its development, particularly the idea of utilizing photo sensors instead of film to capture photos. There were a number of further improvements in digital photography in the years that followed, but prior to the introduction of the digital camera, many were also directly tied to enhancing space photography.
The history of digital photography cannot thus be traced back to a single year or a single development. Instead, digital images are the result of many experts working over many years toward comparable goals. And we can thank them all for digital photography in its current form, even if most of us aren't utilizing it to position ourselves among the stars.
All this digital photography hype, and we haven't even gotten to the first digital camera. The digital camera breakthrough transformed not only space photography, but also the entire field of photography. The inventor of the digital camera came from a firm that you may expect to see mentioned here: Kodak.
Steven Sasson, an Eastman Kodak engineer, invented the digital camera in December 1975. The first digital camera, weighing nearly nine pounds and measuring roughly the size of a regular printer, wasn't precisely the physical prototype for the cameras we see today, at least not from the outside. It was, however, a breakthrough piece of technology, employing CCD chips—which are still used as image sensors today—and a whopping sixteen batteries to allow the user to create digital photographs.