Ready, set, snap! It’s time to focus your lens on creativity this National Camera Day, celebrated each year on 29 June.
This day honours the invention of the camera and the art of photography — a medium more popular today than ever before. In fact, it’s estimated that over 1.5 trillion photos were taken worldwide in 2023 alone, largely thanks to the rise of smartphones and social media.
Whether you're capturing a fleeting moment or crafting a masterpiece, photography is a powerful way to tell stories and preserve memories.
The camera’s journey is as fascinating as the images it captures. The earliest surviving photograph - View from the Window at Le Gras - was created in 1826 by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, using a process called heliography. A few years later, in 1839, Louis Daguerre (often associated with the more widely known Daguerreotype process) helped bring photography closer to the public eye.
Fast forward to 1888, when George Eastman launched a handheld Kodak camera preloaded with film, making photography more accessible to amateurs. His iconic Brownie camera, introduced in 1900, made snapshot photography a part of everyday life and remained popular for decades.
The evolution didn’t stop there. In 1948, the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 hit the market, producing instant photos in under a minute. Then, in the digital era, Fuji’s DS-1P, widely regarded as the first digital camera prototype, emerged in 1988, and by 1999, the world saw its first camera phone: the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan.
Today, many of us carry professional-level cameras in our pockets every day — all built into our smartphones.
If photography excites you, we offer a range of courses at our Dartford and Tonbridge campuses.
Students benefit from state-of-the-art equipment, including DSLR cameras, film cameras, and lenses, as well as access to professional-standard digital imaging and editing software such as Adobe Creative Suite, Photoshop, Bridge, and Lightroom. Facilities include two well-equipped photographic studios, where students receive technical support from the Photography team.
Additionally, students have access to a Mac computer suite and can gain hands-on experience in the darkroom to develop their hand-printing skills.
To find out more, visit the Photography course page on our website.