This book is a popular history of photography told through brief, illustrated chapters on fifty landmark cameras and the photographers who used them. The history of photography is in part a history of the cameras that moved the medium forward and gave photographers different ways of seeing and depicting the world. In the hands of certain photographers—think of Weegee with his Speed Graphic or Robert Capa with his Leica—individual cameras created whole new visual styles.             For much of the camera's history, it was a mechanical device. By the 1950s, electrical control of shutters and exposure requiring a battery had increasingly became the norm. From the late 1970s, electronic and then computer control of camera functions were introduced to higher specified and more expensive cameras. The arrival of commercially viable digital cameras, which recorded an image on a CCD sensor rather than on film from the early 1980s, transformed the camera to a fully electronic device. By the mid-2000s, digital cameras were outselling film cameras, and in 2012 smartphone cameras were outselling digital cameras by a factor of six.

The definition of what a camera was had changed as different electronic devices converged into one unit. The camera seems set for a further dramatic period of change in both its functionality and appearance.             A History of Photography in Fifty Cameras relates this story by selecting fifty key camera models and analyzing them in chronological order. The origin and development of each model is described in detail, along with its impact on both the art and science of photography.