1877: Stop-Motion
Movies were born the day a man bet horses could fly. In 1877 landscape photographer wanted to see if galloping horses ever lift all four hooves at once. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, Muybridge placed rapid-exposure cameras around a racetrack, each coupled to a tripwire that opened its shutter for 1/500th of a second when the horse ran past. The resulting series, "," proved that horses indeed go airborne, if only for milliseconds at a time. To wow audiences, Muybridge invented the , a backlit rotating glass disk that blurred his freeze frames into a moving image; he presented some 100,000 of his black-and-white images鈥攊ncluding the flying eagle seen here鈥攐n the same contraption during a 15-year world tour. The zoopraxiscope went on to serve as the foundation of motion-picture projectors and, thus, all modern cinema.鈥Becca Cudmore
1900: Film
wrote the book on wildlife photography. Really. The two Englishmen took the first picture of a bird鈥檚 nest with eggs, in 1892, the first of many they would publish in some of the earliest known volumes of bird photos. (Here they are in 1900, attempting the feat again.) In fact, the Keartons鈥 book With Nature and a Camera, which is focused almost entirely on birds, is partly to thank for popularizing the entire field of wildlife photography. A reviewer in the October 1898 issue of The Auk heralded the authors for their use of a 鈥渓ens camera,鈥 then a relatively recent technology that seemed poised to give pencil and paper a run for its money. 鈥淸Photographs] not only furnish a record of facts which the worker with brush or pencil cannot hope to equal,鈥 the reviewer wrote, 鈥渂ut many of them possess a beauty rivaling the best productions of the natural history artist.鈥 We couldn鈥檛 agree more.鈥擱aillan Brooks
1968: Strobe
By our count, it took at least four engineers to make this strobe-flash photo of a Northern Parula, an early stop-motion image. There was Harold Edgerton, who designed the first stroboscopic flash鈥攁 burst of light that added softer, more natural light to a scene than conventional flash attachments鈥攁nd who taught the photographer to jerry-rig his own 1/10,000th-of-a-second exposures. Then there were the scientists at Strobo Research in Milwaukee, whose early model electronic bulbs replaced the artist鈥檚 single-use analog versions. And it didn鈥檛 hurt that Crawford Greenewalt, inventor of a motion-sensing shutter-trip device, lent his contraption to the man behind the camera.
The photographer himself, , was trained as a chemical engineer and doctor, professions he left to become one of the preeminent color photographers of the 20th century. His 50-year career bears all the marks of his scientific training鈥攑recision, patience, and the kind of techno-wizardry found in this 1968 portrait of a parula mid-flit. Before strobe photography, getting the perfect shot of wildlife was mostly a matter of luck. These days, though, it鈥檚 as easy as screwing in a light bulb.鈥搁.叠.
2005: Camera Trap
The keeps a low profile. It sticks to the shrubbery and dense trees of sub-Saharan forests, emerging only to pluck beetles and moths out of the African wilderness. Without camera traps鈥攚hether live feeds or the motion-triggered one-snap variety that caught this individual in Zambia鈥檚 Luangwa Valley鈥攜ou would have only the owl鈥檚 syncopated hoot to help track it down. When National Geographic published the world鈥檚 , in July 1906, two of the magazine鈥檚 board members left their seats in disgust. But the response from readers was so positive that it spurred Geographic to become the photojournalism-driven outfit we know today.鈥搁.叠.
2010: Digital
Macaws love company, but even they need a bit of personal space. For famed bird photographer to approach this , a resident of the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, digital photography鈥檚 precision at long distance was key.
was already well established when Zuckerman began photographing birds in 2007. NASA had begun using it in the 鈥60s to turn signals from space probes into maps of the lunar surface. The technology was then turned over to spy-satellite programs and, finally, adapted by Kodak in the 鈥70s for commercial use. The first digital print, in 1986, contained 1.4 million pixels; in 2014 a print of the moon鈥檚 north pole was 500,000 times bigger.鈥擯urbita Saha
2011: Aerial
Even just one is camera candy. But if you don鈥檛 want to miss several hundred thousand of the birds in giant rose eddies, as seen here at their breeding grounds at Lake Bogoria, Kenya, then you鈥檒l want to take to the skies.
This picture is from 2011, but the history of aerial photography starts in 1858 with French balloonist Gaspard-F茅lix Tournachon鈥檚 of Paris. For a century the technique was used mostly for military reconnaissance, like the CIA鈥檚 (its details remain classified). But today aerials are both a standard for landscape photography and for tracking migrations and surveying habitat. Now scientists are shooting even higher: The number of satellite imaging jobs in the U.S. is expected to grow by 8,300 between 2012 and 2022.鈥搁.叠.
2014: Macro
That we can still make out this feather鈥檚 every ripple and fiber at five times its size is a marvel of modern computing. is the process of stacking or combining extreme close-up photos of the same object taken at multiple focal lengths, creating crisp canvases at mammoth magnifications. It鈥檚 a big help to scientists, who are usually obliged to alter specimens in some way to achieve this level of detail (the only other technique as powerful, , not only requires coating the sample in gold but also distorts the subject鈥檚 true color). It鈥檚 a boon to artists, too: With such powerful tools at their disposal, every cilium and strand becomes an unexplored universe.鈥搁.叠.