Williams: The History of Photography NAME: _________________

1. Where does the word “Photography” come from? What is the modern meaning of the word?

2. Describe how a “camera obscura” (also known as a “pinhole camera”) works. What happens to
the image?

3. How does the size of the hole in a pinhole camera affect the image?

4. How did Thomas Wedgewood create his “sun pictures”? What are these images also known as?

5. When was the world’s first surviving photograph taken? Who was the photographer?

6. Describe the image created in a Daguerreotype.

7. How did William Henry Fox Talbot create his calotype photographs? How were they different
from Daguerreotypes?
8. What was an advantage and disadvantage of F. Scott Archer’s collodion process?

9. What are carte-de-visite photographs?

10. How did stereoscopic cameras (and the images they produced) differ from regular cameras?

11. What did George Eastman produce in the 1880s? What advantage did this product have?

12. What new products were developed by the Polaroid Corporation?

13. Describe the first attempt at building a digital camera, in 1975.

14. When was the first true digital camera built? What was it?

15. What company built the first commercial digital SLR camera in 1991 and what did it cost?

16. When did the first camera phones appear, and in what country?