At the same time that Talbot and others were experimenting with the chemical side of photography, advances were being made in the design of the camera itself. A shutter was added to control exposure times, which had grown significantly shorter due to the advances in imaging materials. With exposure times now shortened to as little as 1/25th of a second, not only were shots that stopped action now possible, but people didn't have to hold a pose for minutes at a time to have their portraits taken. Although the cameras of the period were bulky and large by our modern standards, their size had to be able to accommodate the large imaging plates of the time.

In the late 1870s, American George Eastman, a junior bank clerk and avid amateur photographer, began experimenting with gelatin emulsions in his mother's kitchen at night. In 1880, in Rochester, New York, he established a manufacturing company to make dry plates based on his formula. Eastman continued to refine the process, and in 1885, he patented a machine that coated a continuous roll of paper with emulsion.

Three years later, Eastman introduced the Kodak camera. With the promotional slogan “You press the button, we do the rest,” it sold for $25 and came already loaded with a 20-foot roll of paper film, enough for 100 exposures. (A year later, Eastman substituted the paper roll with one made of celluloid.) After all frames were exposed, the user sent the entire camera back to Eastman's company. There, the film was processed, printed, and the camera was loaded with a new roll, after which it was sent back to its owner with the negatives and a set of prints.

Eastman continued to refine his camera, making each new version a bit smaller and a little more technologically advanced than previous models. He was able to bring the cost of a camera down to $5 — a good price for the time — but Eastman was determined to come up with an even cheaper product that anyone could afford to buy. In 1900, with the debut of the Brownie, he fulfilled his long-held dream of putting the magic of photography into the hands of anyone who wanted to snap a shutter. The Brownie cost just $1, and it used film that sold for fifteen cents a roll.

Old cameras were often clumsy contraptions.

The first Kodak cameras used film that was physically much larger than what we're used to today, as the chemicals used in film manufacturing and the lenses of the time were somewhat crude. As time went on, emulsions and lenses became more refined, and the need for large-format film to produce acceptable images diminished.