Although photography is over 200 years old, digital imaging actually predates photography. The Romans and Greeks grouped small tiles to make up a picture. We call these mosaics, the reality is that they are pictures made up of hundreds or thousands of small coloured tiles just like today’s digital images.

Early digital picture made up with PIXELS (PICture ELemtS)

There are a few milestones in the development of photography and here is a brief history tour.

	1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; if displayed under light stronger than candle light the image would deteriorate rapidly. Doesn’t this have undertones of things to come – we now call it light fastness.
	1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. positive images were made by contact printing on to another sheet of paper.
	1877: First subtractive colour print produced by Louis Ducos Du Hauron, the print was made with a pigment ink process. Photograph taken in Agen - Southern France - the original print can be viewed at the George Eastman house. It's more than a coincidence that we are returning back to pigment inks?

Photography developed at a steady pace during the rest of the 19th century. Caped crusaders with their large plate cameras created a fabulous wealth of photographs documenting street life. These pictures form an important historic document of the period.

Traditional artists saw photography as a threat, photographic portraits were a much cheaper and quicker alternative to commissioning a painting.

	1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced costing $1.00. This brings photography into the hands of the masses.
	1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Oscar Barnack's camera its called the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera. This camera was instrumental in the development of photo-reportage photography.
	1936: development of Kodachrome, the first colour multi-layered colour film; Now photographers don’t have to interpret the world in monochrome tones. Exakta camera launched, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
	1946: The Bikini a simple two piece swimsuit is responsible for launching many budding photographers into a new career.
	1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first modular system medium-format SLR for photographers
	1959: Nikon F introduced. – bayonet mount lenses enabled quick change of lenses
	1963: first colour instant film developed by Polaroid
	1970’s: sees the development of TTL, auto exposure, zoom lenses, winders and motor drive cameras – a perfect gift for Kodak especially the 9 FPS drives, three seconds for a roll of film - imagine the profit?
	1981: Sony Corporation announced the "Revolutionary Video Still Camera Called 'Mavica'," The production camera stored images on a standard 3.5" floppy disk "No more darkroom chemicals!" A sign of things to come, but wouldn’t be available for another 8 years.
	1984: HP introduces the HP’s first inkjet printer, the “Think Jet”, It used a 12-nozzle head and was a text-only printer that needed special paper and wasn’t capable of producing photos.
	1985: Minolta markets the world's first auto focus SLR system, cameras become more sophisticated but features level out before the end of the decade.
	1990: Adobe launches Photoshop version 1.07 followed at regular intervals by more sophisticated releases and book after book on how to use this software.
	1994: Epson introduces the Epson Stylus Color 720, a printer capable of producing near photographic quality - but long lasting prints was not a high priority. A can of worms waiting to be opened.
	2000 - : film is rapidly being replaced by memory cards
	26th September 2006: .........................

I will add to this list - if you know of an important milestone in photography then post it here on our forum and I will add the best suggestions to the above list.

Vincent