Advancements In Photography

Although photography wasn’t invented until the early 19th century, its basic concept first emerged about 2000 years ago with the advent of a device called the camera obscura (history.com). Also known as the pinhole camera, this device was either a darkened chamber or box with a small hole on one wall which reflected an image of what was outside the chamber onto the opposite wall. The resulting image was an obscure mirrored reflection which was projected upside down. The camera obscura was prevalent throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and was commonly used by artists to assist with drawing and painting. Strangely enough, many people feared this device and associated it with sorcery, and very few artists publicly conceded that they used it. Major advancements in photochemistry
However, the process took about 8 hours of light exposure, plus the image would gradually fade and diminish. About a decade later, Louis Daguerre invented a new technique which reduced the exposure time to about 10-20 minutes. In 1839, Daguerre refined the process and further reduced the exposure time to under a minute. This breakthrough method was aptly named “Daguerreotype,” and quickly gained worldwide popularity. In 1841, William Talbot introduced “Calotype,” which used photosensitive paper instead of metal plates. Although the pictures weren’t quite as clear as with Daguerreotype, they could be easily reproduced countless times from a single negative. Yet another decade later, Frederick Archer developed the wet-collodion process, which provided sharp high-quality images that were easy to duplicate. This process involved applying a solution called collodion onto glass plates known as “wet plates,” and narrowed the exposure phase to just a few seconds. During the 1870s, the “dry plate” was devised by treating glass negative plates with a special dried gelatin. Dry plates preserved their photosensitivity for extensive time periods, which enabled them to be stored