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World's First Photo

Posted by michael on from the say-cheese dept.

angkor cut-and-pastes "'The image acknowledged as the world's first photograph - taken by a French inventor in 1826 - has passed its first full-scale analysis with flying colors and is now awaiting an airtight case that will keep it safe for centuries to come, scientists said Wednesday.'" See also the first color photography.

5 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad that... by qurob · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The first picture I ever took with my digital camera faded away, due to the ink in my canon inkjet

    Do you think in 5 years I'll be able to pull these pictures off my CDR's? Much less to show my grandchildren...

    1. Re:Too bad that... by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes... yes you will.
      Cd rom drives will be available. Hell I still have a bernulli drive and those have been out of date for over 10 years. I can still read a 5.25 inch floppy and I'll bet that I can find someone with a 8 inch floppy drive and a computer that can read it+ write it to a modern format, or at least connect to a linux box via serial port and upload it.

      Hell, I know someone that has the dreaded syquest drive.

      many many of us still have nasty-old tech lying around, and if you use something that was in widespread acceptance, it makes it super easy to convert (cdrom)

      Right now it's easier to find a 9track tape drive than a 8inch floppy drive.. as the 9 track tape was widely used while 8inch floppy was sparsely used for ony a 2 year span before the tech moved to 5.25 inch.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  2. outrageous... by lfourrier · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...to have a Reuters sig under a photo obviously in the public domain for a long time.

    Capitalism is no excuse for the privatisation of the commons. Signing this photo reuters instead of Niepce is clearly stealing.

  3. PORN! by sahala · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I've lost track of the humber of technologies that were initially driven by porn.

    Some would say this makes a lot of sense biologically. It's a bit of a reduction, but why do anything (read, build technology) unless it helps us survive and procreate? I'd say that porn is a expressional side-effect of the basic human need for sex.

    But then again I'm sure all geeks, with better things to do such as recompiling their kernel, are above such simple things as procreation. :)

    No this is not offtopic. Sit down.

  4. Re:And on a related note: by tempfile · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It's not. That's the sad part of the digital age: Everything just vanishes, and the concepts are so obscure and complicated that future attempts of reconstruction can only fail.



    I discovered a real treasure a few weeks ago: My grandmother's photo album containing top quality pictures of her parents as youngsters. That was in the late 1800s. Just by looking at these pictures, no technical gadgets needed, a time that is long past really came to life in my mind. I saw a picture of my great-grandfather on his way into the First World War, pictures from my grandfather when he met my grandmother, pictures of my hometown from a hundred years ago. It's better than any history book.



    What will be left of the digital pictures, M$ Word documents, MP3 music, what will be left of our lives that our grandchildren can look at or listen to in 150 years? Of our culture? How long does digital data live, how long do even today's printouts live? To be honest, the very fact that everything will just get lost unless much effort of preservation is taken bothers me so much that I'm asking myself whether I should move to digital photography at all. I want my time and life to come alive in my great-grandchildrens' minds as well.