early photographic processes

Concept and First attempts.

A photography is known as a responsibly stable image made by the effect of light on a chemical substance.

The wording “photography” was not created by just the one man.

The term may have first been used by Antoine Hercules Romuald Florence in 1833.

John Herschel also used the term photography and photograph.

Thomas Wedgwood was one of the fist to record light sensitive images with chemicals.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce tried his very own experiments using paper sensitive and silver chloride.

Around 1816 Niepce created negative images, yet was unsatisfied with the product.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was also looking for a means to secure images. Niepce and Daguerre decided to enter partnerships and work on it together.

The experiments began by exposing silver plates with iodine in the back of a camera obscura.

In 1833 Niepe died, leaving his experiments and successful images unpublished.

A few years later on Daguerre discovered another process and named it the Daguerreotype. It was an image that was both positive and negative depending on the angle it was viewed.

Photography on paper

William Henry Fox Talbot began his own experiments in 1834. With his experiments he was able to make the discovery of making the unexposed areas of the image less sensitive.

Hippolyte Bayard invented a direct positive process on paper in 1839.Bayard then tried to claim the invention of photography.

In 1840 Max Petzval designed a faster lens. It was specifically designed for portrait images and then became the basis for portraits for the next 70 years.

1841 Talbot changed chemicals and had then invented the Calotyye meaning “beautiful”.

In the 1840’s to the 1850’s calotypes were made by a small number of photographers.

The business of photography

By the late 1840’s the daguerreotype was being processed commercially in every industrialized nation of the world.

In 1848 Frederick Scott Archer discovered the process of the wet plate process.

The art of photography

Critics failed to see photography as art and this attitude continued for many years.