The beginning of the camera dates back to the ancient Chinese and ancient Greek civilisations. The cameras we use today emerged with the development of the dark boxes used by painters in the Middle Ages; ‘cameraobscura’ in Latin.

In 1021 AD, the Arab physicist Ibn al Hayzem analysed the pinhole camera in his book on optics and put forward the working principles of the ‘cameraobscura’. The first ‘cameraobscura’ were too big to be carried. The first portable camera was developed by Johan Zahn in 1685, 150 years before the invention of photography.

The first permanent image was obtained by Joseph Nicephore Niepce with a plate covered with a type of asphalt called Judea bitumen.

The first successful photographs were taken in 1837 by Lois Daguerre on silver-coated copper plates and registered by the French Academy in 1839 as the Dagurretype, named after its inventor.

In 1840, the Englishman William Henry FoxTalbot developed the process he called callotype and obtained the first successful negative and positive images.

We owe the first flexible-based films and machines that can be used by almost everyone to the Kodak Company. Launched in 1888 with the slogan ‘you press the button and we'll do the rest’, the first Kodak cameras made photography an endeavour that anyone could achieve.

We owe the popularity of 35 mm film to Oscar Barnac, one of the engineers of Leitz Company. The Leica cameras developed by him and released in 1925 made this film format popular. (The word Leica was formed by combining the first three letters of the surname of the company owner Ernest Leitz with the first two letters of the word camera).

The development of reflex cameras can be considered to have begun in 1928 with the introduction of the first medium format twin-lens reflex camera.

The single-lens reflex camera was produced by Ihage under the Exakta brand in 1933.

The first Polaroid camera was launched in 1945 as the Model 95.

The first digital camera with CCD sensor was developed by Steven Sason, an engineer at Eastman Kodak Company, in 1975.

The first applications were made in the military and scientific field. Later, medicine and the press began to use digital photography. Since the mid-1990s, digital cameras have been used by consumers. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the use of film has decreased rapidly, and since 2010, a digital camera has started to be placed in mobile phones ...