Interesting Facts about Photography

We have been making photographs for some 200 years now. Here are some interesting facts about photography that happened at that time:

• Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth, Wales, is a place that holds the largest camera obscura in the world.
• All films are made to be sensitive to visible light, X-rays, and high-energy particles.
• The first transparent plastic roll film was made in 1889.
• The first digital camera was made in 1975. It weighed 3.6 kg, could take an image that was 100 x 100 pixels, and needed 23 seconds to take and record it.
• The most expensive camera on the planet costs 2.79 million dollars (or 2.16 million Euros). It is a 1923 Leica O-Series camera, and it was sold for that price at a WestLicht auction in Vienna.

• Delish Parekh of Mumbai has the largest collection of cameras in the world. He has 4,425 cameras and has been collecting them since 1977.
• Earliest photographs needed a long time to be taken. They needed a long exposure time so that a strong image could remain on the plate. Photographers would “camouflage” parents into the scenery to keep children pacified when taking images.
• Largest seamless photograph in the world is 10 meters high and 34 meters wide. It is a photograph of a control tower and runways at the US Marin Corps Air Station in El Toro, Orange County, California. It was taken by converting a decommissioned jet hanger into a giant pinhole camera.

• The earliest surviving photograph is “View from the Window at Le Gras” by Nicéphore Niépce in 1926 or 1827. It needed 8 hours of exposure.
• Today, we take as many photographs every 2 minutes as we did in the 19th century.
• Camera Obscura, an important part of the photographic camera, was known in the 5th century BC.
• 12 Hasselblad cameras are left on the surface of the Moon to make room and lessen the weight so moon rock samples can be brought to Earth.
• The longest photographic negative has 39.54 m and was taken by Esteban Pastorino Diaz in 2010.
• The largest photo book is 40.52 m² and is a work of Samsung Electronics GmbH for the Museum of Communication. It has 16 pages and 28,000 photos.
• Shinichi Yamamoto of Japan printed the largest printed photograph. It was 145m long and 35.6cm wide.
• The first full-color cartoon was made by Disney in 1932. It was called Flowers and Trees, and it lasted 8 minutes.
• The first photograph to represent a person was taken in 1838 by Daguerre. It was a photograph of a street - "Boulevard du Temple," its exposure lasted long, and no other people were seen in the photograph. The person in the photo had their shoes cleaned and, because of that, is visible.
• The First known shared picture via a cell phone was by Philippe Kahn in 1997. It was a birth picture of his daughter.

• French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (known as "Nadar") took the first aerial photograph from his balloon in 1858. This photo was of Paris, but it doesn’t exist anymore. James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King took the oldest aerial photo of Boston in 1860.
• Facebook has around 140 billion photos which is 100 000 times more photos in the Library of Congress.
• It is estimated that, from when we started making photographs in 1800 until today, we have taken over 3.8 trillion standard and digital photographs.