It was an ordinary day. Writing a follow-up to the story I recently posted titled "The Gathering Of Light." The story told about the very first photograph ever taken by a young man named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. My story today will continue that story telling of the first self-portraiture, the first photo of the moon, etc. Selfies have come a long way since Mr. Robert Cornelius took a small daguerreotype outside his family store in Philadelphia back in 1839. He set up his camera at the back of the store and took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into the frame where he sat for a minute before covering the lens once again. On the back of the image he wrote: "The first light Picture ever taken. 1839." The 2013 word of the year was "selfie" which is defined as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website." Oh...if Robert had only known what he had started almost 200 years ago.
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Robert's "Selfie"
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The same year Hippolyte Bayard had a feud with Louis Daguerre over who was the "Father of Photography." Bayard claimed he developed the photography process first but had delayed his announcement and Daguerre claimed the moment. In response, Bayard took this self-portraiture of his fake suicide, claiming that he killed himself because of the feud. It is now known as the first hoax photograph that is titled "Self Portraiture as a Drowned Man."
The first photograph taken of the sun was taken in 1845 by French Physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault. It was taken using the Daguerreotype process on April 2nd, 1845. You may notice several sunspots on the photo.
This first aerial photograph was taken by James Wallace Black and titled "Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See it. It was taken in 1860 from a hot air balloon on October 13. It is from 2,000 feet in the air.
This is the first color photograph taken in 1861 by mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. It is a three-color bow. The inventor of the single lens reflex camera, Thomas Sutton, pressed the shutter button, but Maxwell is credited with the scientific process.
In 1882 William Jennings captured the fury of the zigzag shape of lightning in his camera on September 2. He succeeded in showing that lightening was much more complicated than originally thought as it clawed across the stary sky.
The first photograph from space was taken in 1946. It was taken by a V-2 missile, which was launched on October 24th of 1946. The camera was totally destroyed when it plummeted back to earth at a speed of 500 feet per second, but the film survived.
Finally, the first photograph taken on Mars was in 1976. It was taken on July 20th by Viking 1 after it touched down on the red plane. The photographs were used to study the Martian landscape and structure. The photo is known as the "Blue Marble."
Photography has become much more than what you just saw and read about in this story. Cameras can do so much more than what they used to do and cost a fraction of what they used to. You can even talk to one another on your camera...or should I say that you can take a photo on your phone. Technology is wonderful, isn't it? Where and when will it ever end? Never in your or my lifetime. And...I can say that to every single person reading this story today. Will technology allow us to replace our eyes with cameras so we can see what we place on paper that will exit the side of our head through an ear. Will our vision allow us to see through items to the depth of its core? Will cameras have a mind of their own and document the life of it's owner by creating movie scans that can be seen in the sky? Isn't life fun? I will never be around when most of what I just typed comes to fruition, but that's OK as long as I get one more chance to visit my favorite island of St. Martin and document that which I never had a chance take photos of in the past. See you sometime in the future Barbara and Dee! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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