Around 1520, Albrecht Dürer was using mechanical arrangements to get accurate perspective into his drawings, and published a book for artists on his methods.
In 1727 Johann Schulze saw that some silver salts go black in the presence of light, setting the basis for photography, although it would take a century more.
James Clerk Maxwell showed in 1861 how he could reproduce a tartan from three separate filtered photographs, red, green and blue, when these were recombined.
The thing Maxwell had not allowed for was the total inability of the films of the day to react to red light. In short, the experiment should not have worked!
The red dye in the tartan also reflected ultraviolet light, and by luck, the film used to record the 'red' component also registered UV, and so made an image.
In 1973, Fairchild semiconductor released the first large image forming CCD chip which had 100 rows and 100 columns, a forerunner of the digital camera.
In 1982, compact discs, CDs, were introduced, first as a means of storing and recording music in digital form. Other digital applications soon followed.
Holography is a process that relies on interference effects to create 3D images with coherent light after the interference patterns have been captured on film.
Sonar uses reflected sound to locate objects. Ultrasound is similar in its operation, but it uses reflected high-pitched sound to locate objects.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a method used to form images of the inside of a living thing without any risk of tissue damage from radiation effects.
MRI creates images by detecting hydrogen atoms, mainly in water, but also in other molecules in the body, with a clever use of radio frequency radiation.
Computerised tomography or CAT scans provide 3D images from X-rays, after massive computer processing has been applied to data to produce simple images.