CHAPTER 1 History Strike a Pose Smile Say cheese You’re about to have your picture taken You might be the photographer perfecting that selfie pose or snapping a photo of the food you ordered for lunch In today’s world taking and sharing photographs is as much a part of the day as eating food doing homework or going to school In the past taking a picture was a slow process You had to have a camera with film in it The film had to be purchased at a store When you eventually took the picture it was a gamble Did you have poor lighting Were your arms steady when you 4 21st century skills library
There are a lot of parts to a film camera took the shot Was your finger in the way You wouldn’t know until you shot 24 or 36 pictures on the roll of film developed it and got the pictures back It could take weeks to find out if you didn’t develop the film yourself Then if friends wanted copies of the picture you’d have to request more prints to be made which could also take a few weeks 5 IMAGE SHARING
Instant cameras popularized by Polaroid produced images quickly but you couldn’t share them unless the photographs were photocopied or recreated by taking another photo Today taking a photo doesn’t require a camera just a phone and you can instantly see the image you shot Because of the internet and social media you can share it not just with friends and family but also with the entire world The number of pictures being taken today is staggering Every 24 hours almost 2 billion photos are uploaded to the internet and shared on social media around the world That is 83 3 million every hour about 1 4 million per minute 6 21st century skills library
A History of Pictures By the mid-1980s people were able to send emails But these were only text-based Images could not be attached to them When it first became possible to send images they took so long to upload and attach to the email that it was rarely worth the effort By the late 1990s things had vastly improved The very first image-sharing site Shutterfly was launched In 2000 taking pictures became easier with the first built-in camera cell phone Cell phones later turned into smartphones Smartphones were even better at taking high-quality photos Within a few years phones were able to take photos almost as good as high-end digital cameras With this came a surge of social image-sharing platforms In 2009 Facebook added a new dimension to sharing photos being able to tag people in them 7 IMAGE SHARING
