Through the camera's eye
The official Daquerre camera, produced by Alphonse Giroux. The beautifully made camera measured 12 by 14 1/2 by 20 in. The addition of a lens and a plate holder distinguishes it from an old fashioned camera obscura.
A camera, along with an iodizing boz for sensitizing exposed plates, a mercury box for making the images visible, a sotrage box, and supplies of chemicals, cost the equivalent of eighty dollars, quite a sum in 1840.
Giroux's cameras, beautifully crafted of brass and mahogany, were in many ways small versions of the familiar camera obscura. They were constructed of two sliding boxes, a larger one into which a smaller one would slide. The larger box in front contained a small lens tht was carefully ground to minimize flaws. The rear box was fitted with a mirror to turn the image right side up and a small ground glass screen onto which the image was projected.
The photographer would study the image projected on the screen, moving the camera and adjusting the distance to the subject to compose and focus the shot. Once he was satisfied, he would replace the ground glass screen with a holder for the photographic plate, slide the copper plate coated with silver iodide into the holder, and then take the picture. Most daquerreotype cameras were set up in the homes or studios. For many people, it was far too much trouble to bring the camera and equipment into the field in order to photograph scenery.
Family portraits allowed you to keep a record of the faces of the people who were no longer alive or who lived far away. Before photography, the only images of the relative or friend who died were contained in the memories of those who knew them, since painted portraits were too costly for most people. Now, for the first time, family portraits guaranteed that even people in generations to come would be able to see what their ancestors had looked like.
By the early 1840's, daguerreotype portrait studios were opening across Europe and in the U.S. By 1850 there were at least seventy studios in New York City alone.
.
When posing for a dguerreotupe portrait, people could use special seats, headrests, and other devices to help them maintain the stillness the camera's slow exposure required. Even so, many portraits were ruined by uncontrollable movements.
Still, even with advances in lens design and improvements in the light sensitivity of the plates, a person sitting for a daquerreotype portrait had to stay completely still for half a minute or more a far shorter time than the fifteen minutes required during early daquerreotypes, but still no easy task. The photographer would open the camera's lens (in these early days usually just a lens cap, pivoting metal plate, or piece of dark cloth), and esxpose the plate for the time it took for the exposure. If you moved at all during this exposure time, your face would appear blurred, and the portrait would be ruined.
While daquerreotype studios were springing up everywhere, William Henry Fox Talbot continued to improve this calotype process to produce the finest images possible. Probably his biggest breakthrough came in his discovery of the ''latent image'': a very short exposure left no image on the paper, but if the paper ws soaked in a chemical developing agents, a strong image appeared. Even so, the calotype process never achieved the widespread popularity of the daquerreotype. One reason was that the calotype's image wasn't as brilliant, or as sharp, of the daquerreotype's, so if never became the first choice for portraits. But most crucial ws the fact that a single calotype negative could produce an unlimited number of prints meaning that, for the first time, photographers could make money selling their images to more than single person at a time.
.
In 1844 Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, a history of the calotype that was the first book to ever be illustrated with photographs. By the mid nineteenth century there were also dozens of books on the art and science of photography ranging from how to manuals to guides to building your own cameras and grinding your own lenses. There was a widespread enthusiasm for photography, it was due entirely to the arrival of the daguerreotype and calotype.. Yet those two processes would barely survive photography's early boom years. By the 1850s and Englishman called Frederick Scott Archer had invented a system that would be called the "wt plate," or collodion process. A glass plate was coated with a sticky, syrupy material known as collodion that had been mixed with a very small quantity of a chemical called ammonium bromide. The plate was then immersed in a bath of silver nitrate forming light sensitive silver bromide. It was essential to expose and develop the plate when it was still wet, when it dried, it lost sensitivity. The wet plate was placed in the camera , and a picture wss taken. After an exposure of between three and twelve seconds depending on lighting conditions,negative image wasproduced ths more finelydetailed than the calotype and which didn't suffer from graininess caused by the calotype's paper negative.
Archer was als may responsible fo an image called an ambrotype. A developed wet plate negative was mounted in a case against a black back ground. This had the effect of apparently reversing the tones of the negative, the white areas becoming dark and the dark areas simply becoming darker. Although not as brilliant as a daguerreotype, the ambrotype was much cheaper to make.
A variation on the ambrotype was the ''tintype''. A piece of thin steel was painted black, coated with collodion, and sensitized. the developed picture, usually a portrait, was positive without any further treatment, and had the added advantage of being almost indestructible. Photographers had to carry darkrooms with them, so they would be able to prepare the plate and load the camera without exposing the plate to sunlight. They all had to carry all the chemicals required to coat, sensitize, develop and fix the plate, it was common to see professional photographers carrying portable darkrooms (actually, easily erected tents) on their backs.
Such portable darkrooms soon became an expected sight in even the most remote corners of the U.S and Europe, and across the world. As a result, the public finally got to see the differences between the faces of people in distant countries and their own; how the landscapes of tropical regions differed from their homeland; and what important local and foreign people (from Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria) really looked like.
One innovate idea, introduced around 1860, was the folding below camera, in which nearly everything was collapsible: The lens could be pushed into the body of the camera, and the box folded in on itself, making a package that was relatively easy to carry.
An even more significant advance and one that photographers had been hoping would come about since the collodion process was invented in the early 1850s finally arrived in the late 1870s, when the first photographic dry plate process was invented. A glass plate coated with dried gelation, an almost colorless protein obtained by boiling animal hooves and bones, was then coated with a light sensitive emulsion and could be used at any time. Photographers carried the individual dry plates with them, took pictures easily when and where they liked, and then waited until returning home to develop and print the pictures.
Archer was als may responsible fo an image called an ambrotype. A developed wet plate negative was mounted in a case against a black back ground. This had the effect of apparently reversing the tones of the negative, the white areas becoming dark and the dark areas simply becoming darker. Although not as brilliant as a daguerreotype, the ambrotype was much cheaper to make.
A variation on the ambrotype was the ''tintype''. A piece of thin steel was painted black, coated with collodion, and sensitized. the developed picture, usually a portrait, was positive without any further treatment, and had the added advantage of being almost indestructible. Photographers had to carry darkrooms with them, so they would be able to prepare the plate and load the camera without exposing the plate to sunlight. They all had to carry all the chemicals required to coat, sensitize, develop and fix the plate, it was common to see professional photographers carrying portable darkrooms (actually, easily erected tents) on their backs.
Such portable darkrooms soon became an expected sight in even the most remote corners of the U.S and Europe, and across the world. As a result, the public finally got to see the differences between the faces of people in distant countries and their own; how the landscapes of tropical regions differed from their homeland; and what important local and foreign people (from Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria) really looked like.
One innovate idea, introduced around 1860, was the folding below camera, in which nearly everything was collapsible: The lens could be pushed into the body of the camera, and the box folded in on itself, making a package that was relatively easy to carry.
An even more significant advance and one that photographers had been hoping would come about since the collodion process was invented in the early 1850s finally arrived in the late 1870s, when the first photographic dry plate process was invented. A glass plate coated with dried gelation, an almost colorless protein obtained by boiling animal hooves and bones, was then coated with a light sensitive emulsion and could be used at any time. Photographers carried the individual dry plates with them, took pictures easily when and where they liked, and then waited until returning home to develop and print the pictures.
.
In an 1860 magazine article, scientist and photographer John Herschel had dreamed of ''the possibility of taking a photograph, as it were, by a snapshot of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time.'' Now in 1878, this dream had become a reality, and the era of the snapshot had begun.
For the first time, photographers began recording the images of everyday lifw. A public that had bearly gotten used to the stiff poses in daguerreotypes was amazed to see these lively scenes reproduced on a piece of paper.
Muybridge aligned a dozen or more specially designed high speed cameras and photographed people,horses, camels, or other animals as they trotted, ran, or jumped past. The London Globe was typically annoyed, complaining that when enjoying a painting of a horse race, lovers of art didn't need ''Mr. Muybridge to tell us that no horses ever strode in the fashion shown in the picture. It may indeed be fairly contended,'' the newspaper huffed, ''that the incorrect position (according to science) is the correct position (according to art).''
For the first time, photographers began recording the images of everyday lifw. A public that had bearly gotten used to the stiff poses in daguerreotypes was amazed to see these lively scenes reproduced on a piece of paper.
Muybridge aligned a dozen or more specially designed high speed cameras and photographed people,horses, camels, or other animals as they trotted, ran, or jumped past. The London Globe was typically annoyed, complaining that when enjoying a painting of a horse race, lovers of art didn't need ''Mr. Muybridge to tell us that no horses ever strode in the fashion shown in the picture. It may indeed be fairly contended,'' the newspaper huffed, ''that the incorrect position (according to science) is the correct position (according to art).''
.
Eadweard Muybridge was the first to take stop action photographs, in which movements, even familiar ones, are broken down and begin to seem unfamiliar. Even after seeing these photographs, many people refused to believe that trotting horses pick up all four legs off the ground at the same time.
Manufacturers then began producing a startling array of new cameras The first practical movie camera was made in the early 1890s using a modified form of film designed by George Eastman. these cameras used film perforated on both edges and mounted on sprockets that would move past the lens to take a series of photographs in rapid succession. When projected into a screen, the resulting images seemed to move. Another important advance was the arrival of smaller handheld cameras to replace the bulky old models that stood on tripods or other stands.
With the invention of the dry plate, it was possible to make a variety of unusual designs. The first true shutters, capable of uncovering and then covering the lens in a fraction of a second, were added. They were a necessity, given the short new exposure times brought about by the light sensitivity of the gelatin dry plates. Powered by springs or rubber bands, the first shutters were usually made up of small metal disks or plates that would slide quickly over the lens, leaving the film exposed for a lenght of time determined by the photographer.
In the early 1880s, the most popular smaller cameras were called ''detective cameras''. They were designed to allow you to ''play detective,'' taking photos of people without their knowledge. To this end, detective cameras came disguised as bags, hats, handles of walking sticks, gift boxes, pistols, watches, and other familiar objects. What was most important about the camera fad was that it pushed camera manufacturers to create smaller and smaller cameras. The result was a portable unit shaped like an oblong box, with a viewfinder, focusing scale, lens, shutter, and a handle or carring strap. The compact camera was just big enough to hold the glass plates that were now available in a number of sizes. the dry plate could be loaded by the photographer just before he took the picture.
Most people weren't willing or able to take on all the chores an expense involved with photography. Someone was going to have to come up with something that was easier to use than glass plates and make the process of taking, developing, and printing a photograph so simple that there would be no reason not to take up photography as a hobby.
The job fell to a brilliant man named George Eastman, who finally made the camera easily available to the world.