The history
From twelve cameras and a galloping horse in 1878 to digital sensors, drones and phones, with film still refusing to die.
A cinema camera is a machine for taking many still pictures very fast, then showing them so quickly that your brain sees motion. First people had to catch movement at all, then pull a strip of film through a camera one frame at a time, steadily, silently and in colour. After a century of film, electronic sensors took over, and cameras became small enough to fly, float and fit in a pocket.
1878
Sequence of photos of a galloping horse
Eadweard Muybridge, USA
1888
Oldest surviving motion picture (widely considered)
Louis Le Prince, Leeds, England
28 Dec 1895
Film show for a paying audience (widely considered)
Auguste and Louis Lumière, Paris
7 Jul 1896
Moving pictures shown in India
Marius Sestier for the Lumières, Bombay
1913
Indian feature film
Dadasaheb Phalke, Raja Harishchandra
1937
Reflex 35 mm production movie camera
ARRI Arriflex 35, Germany
1976
Films using a Steadicam
Garrett Brown; Bound for Glory, Marathon Man, Rocky
2001
Feature shot entirely in digital high definition
Vidocq, France (Sony HDW-F900)
2009
Cinematography Oscar for a mostly digital film
Anthony Dod Mantle, Slumdog Millionaire
1870 – 1895
Photographers and inventors race to take pictures fast enough, and one after another, to capture movement.
1878
15 June 1878
Leland Stanford wanted to know if a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground. Muybridge lined up a row of cameras along a track, and the horse tripped their shutters one after another as it ran past. The pictures showed the answer was yes.
Why it mattered. It proved that a fast series of still photos can capture movement too quick for the eye to see.
1882
Marey, a scientist who studied how animals move, built a chronophotographic gun. You aimed it like a rifle, and a spinning disc inside took 12 pictures in one second, all from a single lens. He used it to study birds in flight.
Why it mattered. One camera taking rapid pictures through one lens is the basic idea of every movie camera.
1888
October 1888
Le Prince, a French inventor living in Leeds, used his single-lens camera to film family and friends walking in a garden at Roundhay. The clip lasts only about two seconds, yet it is often called the oldest surviving motion picture. In 1890 Le Prince boarded a train to Paris and was never seen again.
Why it mattered. He made working moving pictures years before the famous names, a reminder that 'firsts' are often disputed.
1891
1891–1893
Dickson led the work at Edison's laboratory on a camera called the Kinetograph and a peep-show viewer called the Kinetoscope. An electric motor pulled a strip of perforated film past the lens, stopping it for each picture. By 1893 they had built the Black Maria, a film studio that could turn to follow the sun.
Why it mattered. Their strip of film, about 35 mm wide with holes along the edges, became the shape of cinema for the next century.
1895 – 1950
35 mm film, a claw and a shutter become the heart of every movie camera. Sound fixes the speed at 24 frames a second, colour arrives, and the viewfinder learns to look through the lens.
1895
13 February and 28 December 1895
The Lumière brothers patented a hand-cranked box that could film, print and project. A small claw pulled the film down one frame at a time while a shutter hid the movement. On 28 December 1895 they showed ten short films to a paying audience in a Paris café, a date widely treated as the birth of cinema.
Why it mattered. It turned moving pictures from a peep show into something a whole room could watch together.
1896
7 July 1896
Only about six months after Paris, a Lumière agent showed six short films at Watson's Hotel in Bombay. Tickets cost one rupee. More shows followed within days at the Novelty Theatre.
Why it mattered. India met cinema almost as early as Europe did, and soon began making its own films.
1909
Film makers agreed on one standard: film 35 mm wide with four perforations along each edge for every frame. That gives 16 frames in every foot of film. Cameras, labs and projectors everywhere could now share the same film.
Why it mattered. The 4-perf 35 mm frame still sets the size of a 'Super 35' digital sensor today.
1912
Wooden cameras swelled, cracked and let in light. The Bell & Howell 2709 had a body of cast aluminium, pins that held each frame perfectly still, and a turret of four lenses you could swing into place. Hollywood studios soon relied on it.
Why it mattered. Steady pins and quick lens changes made pictures sharper and filming faster.
1913
21 April and 3 May 1913
Phalke learned filmmaking on a trip to London, bought a Williamson camera and Kodak film, and made Raja Harishchandra, a silent film about a truthful king. It premiered at the Olympia Theatre in April and opened to the public in May 1913. No woman would act in it, so the queen was played by a man, Anna Salunke.
Why it mattered. It launched what became the biggest film industry in the world by number of films made.
1923
Kodak introduced 16 mm film as a cheaper, safer choice for amateurs, with a complete outfit of camera, projector, tripod, screen and splicer. Schools, explorers, news crews and documentary makers took it up. In 1969 the Swedish cinematographer Rune Ericson stretched its frame wider to make Super 16.
Why it mattered. Smaller film meant smaller cameras that one person could carry, which changed documentary and news forever.
1927
late 1920s
Silent films were often cranked at around 16 to 20 frames a second, and speeds varied. A soundtrack must run at a steady speed, so the industry settled on 24 frames every second. At 24 fps, 1,000 feet of 35 mm film lasts about 11 minutes.
Why it mattered. 24 fps is still the heartbeat of cinema, even on digital cameras.
1932
Mitchell, founded in 1919, made the Standard studio camera and in 1932 the quieter NC. A soundproofed version, the BNC, followed in the 1930s. For decades these heavy, precise cameras shot a large share of Hollywood films.
Why it mattered. Quiet cameras let actors speak on set without the camera noise ruining the sound.
1932
Technicolor's camera used a prism to split the light into three beams, each exposing its own black-and-white film for red, green or blue. Disney's cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932) was first, and Becky Sharp (1935) was the first feature shot entirely this way.
Why it mattered. It showed that full colour could be built from three separate records of light, the same idea a digital sensor uses.
1937
ARRI's Arriflex 35 had a spinning mirror in front of the film. While the shutter was closed, the mirror bounced the image to the viewfinder, so the operator saw exactly what the lens saw. It was light enough to carry, and it became the first reflex 35 mm production movie camera.
Why it mattered. Seeing through the taking lens made framing and focus exact, and every serious cine camera since has done it.
1950 – 1999
Anamorphic lenses stretch the screen, cameras get light enough to carry, and the Steadicam lets them glide.
1953
16 September 1953
Fox bought old Hypergonar lenses invented by the French astronomer Henri Chrétien. These anamorphic lenses squeeze a wide scene sideways onto normal 35 mm film, and a matching lens unsqueezes it in the cinema. The Robe premiered in CinemaScope in September 1953.
Why it mattered. Anamorphic lenses gave cinema its wide shape and their oval flares and streaks, still loved today.
1972
Panavision, founded in 1954 to make better anamorphic lenses, spent four years building the Panaflex. It was quiet enough to record sound without a heavy soundproof box, yet light enough to put on your shoulder. Early films included Magnum Force (1973) and The Sugarland Express (1974).
Why it mattered. Filmmakers could move a full studio camera into real places and handheld shots.
1976
1975–1976
Brown built a vest, a spring-loaded arm and a balanced post that let an operator walk or run while the camera glided smoothly. It was first used on films released in 1976, including Bound for Glory, Marathon Man and Rocky, whose run up the museum steps became famous. Brown won an Oscar for it in 1978.
Why it mattered. Smooth moving shots no longer needed tracks laid on the ground.
1982
Normal 35 mm film left a strip at the side for the soundtrack. Super 35 used that space for picture too, an idea first tried in the 1950s Superscope format. Joe Dunton revived it in 1982, and it spread through the 1980s and 1990s.
Why it mattered. Most digital cinema sensors today are built to roughly this 'Super 35' size.
1999 – 2012
Electronic sensors replace film in the camera and digital files replace prints in the cinema, from Hollywood to small-town India.
2002
2001–2002
Sony's HDW-F900 CineAlta camera recorded high-definition video at 24 frames a second, just like film. The French film Vidocq (2001) was shot entirely with it, and George Lucas used it for Star Wars: Episode II (2002), the first big Hollywood blockbuster shot fully in digital.
Why it mattered. It proved a digital camera could make a cinema film, and the long switch from film began.
2003
2003–2010
The Bengali film Nil Nirjane (2003) is often called India's first feature shot on digital video. Mumbai Xpress (2005) is described as the first censored Indian film filmed in digital format, and Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) was also billed as a first, shot entirely on small digital cameras. Which one counts depends on how you define 'first'.
Why it mattered. Cheap digital cameras let new filmmakers in India make features without buying film stock.
2005
2003–2005
Instead of shipping heavy film prints, Qube and UFO Moviez sent films digitally, UFO by satellite, to low-cost digital projectors. In 2005 the Abirami complex in Chennai became India's first all-digital cinema. Thousands of small-town screens followed.
Why it mattered. Digital delivery let a film open in many more towns on the same day, without costly prints.
2007
April 2006 and August 2007
Jannard, who had founded Oakley sunglasses, announced the RED One in 2006 and began shipping it in August 2007. It recorded 4K images as compressed raw files for a fraction of the price of older digital cinema cameras. Steven Soderbergh used prototypes to shoot Che (2008).
Why it mattered. Affordable 4K raw pushed the old camera makers to go digital fast.
2008
17 September 2008
Canon's EOS 5D Mark II was a photo camera that could also record full HD video on a big full-frame sensor. Its shallow focus looked cinematic and it cost very little by film standards. In 2010 a whole episode of the TV drama House was shot on it.
Why it mattered. Students and independent filmmakers everywhere suddenly had a cinematic-looking camera.
2009
22 February 2009
Slumdog Millionaire was filmed in the streets of Mumbai, much of it on the tiny Silicon Imaging SI-2K digital camera, which could be held in the hand and hidden in crowds. Dod Mantle won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. It was the first film shot mainly in digital to win it.
Why it mattered. It showed the world's top prize for camera work could go to digital.
2010
April 2010
ARRI's first big digital hit had a Super 35 size sensor that captured more than 14 stops of light, from deep shadow to bright sky, with a look many compared to film. ALEXA cameras shot five Best Cinematography Oscar winners in a row from 2011 to 2015. Its 2022 successor, the ALEXA 35, claims 17 stops.
Why it mattered. Wide dynamic range and film-like colour convinced even film-loving cinematographers to switch.
2012 – today
Film makers close factories, drones and phones become cinema cameras, and film survives as a special choice.
2012
19 January 2012; March 2013
Kodak, the biggest maker of film, filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2012. Fujifilm announced it would stop making motion picture film, and ended production in March 2013. By 2013 most top Hollywood films were shot digitally.
Why it mattered. The digital switch was nearly complete, and film became a special choice rather than the default.
2014
25 September 2014
The FAA gave six aerial photography companies permission to fly small camera drones on film and TV sets, with rules like no night flying. Cheap, stable drones, such as the DJI Inspire series from China, soon replaced many helicopter shots.
Why it mattered. Sweeping aerial shots became affordable for almost any production.
2015
January 2015
Tangerine was shot on three iPhone 5s phones with a clip-on anamorphic adapter lens. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and won praise from critics. The money saved on cameras paid for locations and extras.
Why it mattered. The camera in your pocket had become good enough to make a real feature film.
2018
March 2018
In 90 years of Academy Awards, no woman had ever been nominated for Best Cinematography. Rachel Morrison broke that record with Mudbound (2017). Camera departments are still mostly men, but that is slowly changing.
Why it mattered. Who holds the camera shapes how the world is seen on screen.
2023
July 2023
Oppenheimer was shot on 65 mm film, much of it with huge IMAX cameras. For its black-and-white scenes, Kodak made 65 mm black-and-white film for the first time. It became a global hit and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.
Why it mattered. Digital rules, but some filmmakers still choose film for its look, and audiences follow.
Did you know?
A foot of 35 mm film holds 16 frames, so a 1,000 foot roll lasts only about 11 minutes at 24 frames a second.
Most film cameras use a 180 degree shutter: at 24 frames a second, each frame is exposed for 1/48 of a second, which gives movies their natural motion blur.
In Raja Harishchandra (1913) the queen was played by a man, because no woman would agree to act in a film.
Moving pictures reached Bombay in July 1896, only about six months after the Lumière show in Paris.
For Oppenheimer, Kodak made 65 mm black-and-white film for the first time.
The people
1830 – 1904 · Photographer · England, worked in the USA
His rows of cameras froze a galloping horse and showed the world how motion could be sliced into pictures.
1830 – 1904 · Scientist · France
Built a camera shaped like a rifle to study how birds fly.
1841 – c. 1890 · Inventor · France, worked in England
Filmed moving pictures in Leeds in 1888, then vanished on a train journey in 1890.
1860 – 1935 · Inventor and engineer · Born in France to a Scottish father, worked in the USA
Led the building of Edison's Kinetograph camera and the 35 mm film strip.
1862 – 1954 and 1864 – 1948 · Inventors and manufacturers · France
Their Cinématographe filmed, printed and projected, and began public cinema in 1895.
1870 – 1944 · Film director and producer · India
Made India's first feature film and is called the father of Indian cinema.
c. 1900 – 1997 · Actor · India
With her mother Durgabai Kamat, one of the first women to act in Indian films.
1879 – 1956 · Astronomer and inventor · France
His Hypergonar anamorphic lens became the basis of CinemaScope.
born 1942 · Inventor and camera operator · USA
Invented the Steadicam, which made moving camera shots smooth.
born 1955 · Cinematographer · England, based in Denmark
Won the first cinematography Oscar for a film shot mostly on digital cameras.
born 1978 · Cinematographer · USA
First woman nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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