A closer look
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured the oldest surviving photographic image in 1826 or 1827, which required placing a camera obscura facing out of his upstairs window and leaving the bitumen-coated pewter plate exposed to sunlight for roughly eight continuous hours. The sun actually moved across the sky during this massive exposure window, illuminating both sides of the buildings in the final grainy photograph and making the shadows look completely physically impossible. Today, our smartphone cameras capture light in mere fractions of a millisecond and automatically correct our horrific lighting choices with advanced machine learning algorithms. Despite this incomprehensible leap in optical physics and sensor technology, we still manage to take absolutely garbage photos of our lukewarm lattes and complain that the artificial intelligence did not properly smooth out our inherited chin wrinkles
