The concept of photography had been described in 1774, but the practical use of photography began around 1826. Photography became commonly used for portraits about 1893. The first color photograph was made in 1861, but easy-to-use color plates didn’t become available until 1907.
The use of photographic film was begun by George Eastman, who begun manufacturing celluloid film by 1889. The first camera he made was called the “Kodak,” and available in 1888. It was simple enough and low priced enough to appeal to many consumers, and came pre-loaded with film for 100 exposures and had to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the film roll was finished.
In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.
The Kodak “Brownie”, first sold in 1099 was very popular, and was still on sale in the 60’s. The 35mm film format dominated the compact camera market by the 1960’s, and the reflex camera was first offered in a compact format in 1928. The SLR concept was first offered in 1933 and became common by the 1950’s, when Nikon established themselves as the best-known manufacturer of professional camera equipment. During the 60’s, automatic systems and light-metering became common.
JPL labs developed the first concept similar to digital cameras, around 1961, which was used to help astranauts navigate. Analog electronic cameras were tried, but were never practical.By 1975 the first prototype of a solid-state digital camera was made.
There was a digital camera produced in 1988 by Fuji, but it was not released for sale. By the earliy 90’s digital cameras were available, but were very expensive. By the late 90’s, megapixel digital cameras were available from Nikon (which could use the same lenses that their film cameras use) but still over-priced for most consumers.
Since then the number of megapixels has increased, so that today some professional cameras offer more than 60 Magapixels, although most consumer digital SLR’s are not much over 10 Megapixels.
In 2006, Nikon announced that they would phase out most of their film-cameras, as they don’t expect film cameras to be supported for all that many years.