First there was this Chinese guy, Mo Ti, and a bunch of never-heards like some dude called Aristotele. They were some kind of philosophers or whatever. Well anyways, those guys described a pinhole camera somewhere between 4th and 5th centuries BCE.
But the first pinhole camera ever made was by some Arabic guy named … err… Ibn Al-Haytham aka “Alhazen”. Guess his homies called him that… anyways that was the first “camera obscura” ever invented. That was somewhere around 1000AD
Then I think people kinda forgot the whole thing ‘cause the next invention was made 827 years later by Joseph Nicephore Niepce and it was the first photographic picture ever taken.
This other French guy named Louis Daguerre then hooked up with Niepce and after his death, Daguerre managed to improve his work. The year 1839 he developed a more convenient and effective method of photography, naming it after himself - the daguerreotype. Too bad his children then sold the rights for daguerreotype to the French government and the popularity of photography got a huge jump. By the year 1850 there was over 70 daguerreotype studios in New York only.
Then there was some experimenting from various different guys like Henry Fox Talbot who made the first calotype negative. Hamilton Smith made a tintype negative yadda yadda yadda boooriing.
Basically they were all trying to get better pictures by using different sorts of chemicalsÂ… this was leading to the first color picture that was taken in 1861 some Scottish dude, James Clerk Maxwell.
Somewhere between that, the black and white cameras were also invented. They were like these small handheld camera obscuras with a lense. Flash powder was used to enhance the pictureÂ’s quality and speed it was drawn to a paperÂ… sounds cool yeah.
Then technology progress happened and now we have digital cameras. These two guys Willard Boyle and George E. Smith invented the CCD technology so theyÂ’re the ones to thank for that.