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Beginnings

Photography started with a camera and the basic idea has been around since about the 5th Century B.C. For centuries these were just ideas until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura sometime in the 11th Century. Even then, the camera did not actually record images, they simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down. The first camera obscuras used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It took until the 17th Century for camera obscuras to be made small enough to be portable and basic lenses to be added.

Permanent Images

Photography as we know it today began in the late 1830s in France when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable camera obscura to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly.

• Daguerreotype
  This experiment led to collaboration between Niépce and Louis Daguerre that resulted in the creation of the Daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were the forerunners to our modern film. A copper plate was coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapor before it was exposed to light. To create the image on the plate, the earlier Daguerreotypes had to be exposed to light for up to 15 minutes. The Daguerreotype was very popular until it was replaced in the late 1850s by emulsion plates.
  
  
• Emulsion Plates
  Emulsion plates, or wet plates, were less expensive than Daguerreotypes and took only two or three seconds of exposure time. This made them much more suited to portrait photography, which was the most common photography at the time. These wet plates used an emulsion process called the Collodion process, rather than a simple coating on the image plate. Two of these emulsion plates were ambrotype and tintype. Ambrotypes used a glass plate instead of the copper plate of the Daguerreotypes. Tintypes used a tin plate. While these plates were much more sensitive to light, they had to be developed quickly. It was during this time that bellows were added to cameras to help with focusing.
  
  
• Dry Plates
  In the 1870s, photography took another huge leap forward. Richard Maddox improved on a previous invention to make dry gelatine plates that were nearly equal with wet plates for speed and quality. These dry plates could be stored rather than made as needed. This allowed photographers much more freedom in taking photographs. Cameras were also able to be smaller so that they could be hand-held. As exposure times decreased, the first camera with a mechanical shutter was developed.

"Cameras for Everyone

"Photography was only for professionals or the very rich until George Eastman started a company called Kodak in the 1880s. Eastman created a flexible roll film that did not require the constant changing of solid plates. This allowed him to develop a self-contained box camera that held 100 exposures of film. This camera had a small single lens with no focusing adjustment. The consumer would take pictures and then send the camera back to the factory to for the film to be developed, much like our disposable cameras today. This was the first camera inexpensive enough for the average person to afford. The film was still large in comparison to today's 35mm film. It took until the late 1940s for 35mm film to become cheap enough for most people to afford.

"The Horrors of War

"Around 1930, Henri-Cartier Bresson and other photographers began to use small 35mm cameras to capture images of life as it occurred rather than staged portrait shots. When World War II started in 1939, many photojournalists adopted this style. The posed portraits of World War I soldiers gave way to graphic images of war and its aftermath. These images, such as Joel Rosenthal's photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima brought the reality of war across the ocean and helped galvanize the American people like never before. This style of capturing decisive moments shaped the face of photography forever.

"Instant Images

"At the same time 35mm cameras were becoming popular, Polaroid introduced the Model 95. Model 95 used a secret chemical process to develop film inside the camera in less than a minute. This new camera was fairly expensive but the novelty of instant images caught the public's attention. By the mid 1960s, Polaroid had many models on the market and the price had dropped so that even more people could afford it.

"Image Control

"While the French introduced the permanent image, the Japanese brought easy control of their images to the photographer. In the 1950s Asahi, which later became Pentax, introduced the Asahiflex and Nikon introduced its Nikon F camera. These were both SLR-type cameras and the Nikon F allowed for interchangeable lenses and other accessories. For the next 30 years SLR-type cameras remained the camera of choice and many improvements were introduced to both the cameras and the film itself.

"Smart Cameras

"In the late 1970s and early 1980s compact cameras that were capable of making image control decisions on their own were introduced. These "point and shoot" cameras calculated shutter speed, aperture, and focus; leaving photographers free to concentrate on composition. While these cameras became immensely popular with casual photographers, professionals and serious amateurs continued to prefer to make their own adjustments to image control.

"The Digital Age

In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous manufacturers worked on cameras that stored images electronically. The first of these were point and shoot cameras that used digital media instead of film. By 1991, Kodak had produced the first digital camera advanced enough to be used successfully by professionals. Other manufacturers quickly followed and today Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and other manufacturers all offer advanced digital SLR cameras. Even the most basic point and shoot camera now takes higher quality images than Niépce’s pewter plate."

http://photography.about.com/od/historyofphotography/a/photohistory.htm

"Photography was the perfect solution to art in the time of the enlightenment; scientific, reasonablewithout unnecessary flourishes. However the invention of photography changed the value of art - it could no longer be stated that art made after the invention of photography was only valuable as a snapshot of that time period; for that was the job of the camera. In a sense art was given a higher value as it portrayed a personal perception connected with historical events and philosophy."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_invention_of_photography_impact_the_art_world_in_general

http://www.artrev.com/blog/blogentry.asp?bid=156

"When photography was invented and became public in 1839, painting was the domain of artists and artisans serving a variety of needs. Many of the artist's functions were practical and served a range of social duties, celebrating and building the prestige of eminent sitters, spreading information on the physical appearance of the world, its landscape, its wonders, its cities and architecture, commemorating events of local interest or of great historical importance, and providing images which implemented the psychological grip of religions and the hierarchies and structure of society.
Painting also became the domain for the free expression of the imagination. The Romantic tradition re-enforced the concept of painting as Art, freed from illustrative duties, serving the highest purposes of the human spirit. Nonetheless, whatever its purpose, practical or expressive, and however personalized or formalized the end product, artistic depiction was always founded on the convention of illustrating elements recognizable from the visible world. Even wildly imaginative visions or ideas were expressed through identifiable symbols. Piranesi's fantasies were constructed in stone, Blake's angels had wings of feathers. Sketching from life was the only and inevitable induction of the artist, painting from nature the only code. Ideas were developed visually through the assemblage of facts.
Perhaps the greatest contribution which the new technique of photography could make to painting was to liberate Art from its ties to realism, to factuality. There was, ultimately, no need for the artist's pencil or brush to labour intensively to depict and record people, occasions or things which the photographer could document through his lens with practical ease and speed. Art was freed on its path to abstraction. The journey was not so swift, however, nor the goal so immediately evident. The French painter Paul Delaroche is credited with having claimed, on learning of the invention of photography, that "from today painting is dead". His immediate anxieties were greatly exaggerated. Painting flourished through the 19th century within a largely traditional set of conventions and moved on in the first half of the 20th century to the ambitious challenges of abstraction, pure form and colour, leaving to photographers the task of making visual records.

"PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE SERVICE OF PAINTING
Photography may have threatened the livelihood of certain artisan painters, the minor portraitists whose role was eclipsed by the new photographic portrait studios, the topographers or architectural artists whose painstaking work could now be done within a brief exposure of a photographic plate. Many artists, however, recognized photography as an invaluable aid, using the camera directly as a speedy sketching device or using published or commissioned images as visual reference and inspiration. There developed a steady trade in photographs made as artist's studies, études pour artistes. Studies of the human figure, such as those made by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in London, Auguste Belloc, Bruno Braquehais, or Felix Jacques-Antoine Moulin in Paris, served the needs of artists and voyeurs. The detailed analysis of which the camera was capable, recording, for example, the structure of trees, the minute configurations of leaves or stems, served the mid-century artist's obsession with realism. British philosopher John Ruskin encouraged the minute observation of nature by artists. The camera facilitated this function.
Photography could also serve artists by revealing details too fleeting to record with the eye. An oft-quoted example is the recording by Eadweard Muybridge, through instantaneous sequential photographs, of the precise stages of human and animal locomotion. He confirmed that at one stage in the pace of a horse's gallop all four hooves are off the ground. Ironically, it was the greatest fantasists who pursued the most exacting verisimilitude. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's cinematic dream vistas of ancient Rome, for instance, depended for their effect on a photographic exactness in the detail of marble, flower, or fabric. They are an early repudiation of the notion that the camera cannot lie. Their photographic level of veracity is a cunning deceit.
The group of 19th-century artists whose relationship with photography is perhaps most ambiguous is the Impressionists. Their approach to painting was diametrically opposed to the high "photographic" realism of the Academy. They rejected the pursuit of fine detail such as could be recorded unselectively on light-sensitive plates. Their way of looking was concerned rather with the way in which the eye and intellect perceive things rather than the dispassionate way in which the camera records. Yet at the very basis of their approach was the analysis of the effects of light on their subject matter. The Impressionist intuition was an echo of the structured investigations of photo-scientists, both groups sharing an interest in chromatic analysis and in the qualities of light as it defines form"