Dry plates

Collodion dry plates had been available since 1855, thanks to the work of Désiré van Monckhoven, but it was not until the invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox that they rivaled wet plates in speed and quality. Also, for the first time, cameras could be made small enough to be hand-held, or even concealed. There was a proliferation of various designs, from single- and twin-lens reflexes to large and bulky field cameras, handheld cameras, and even "detective cameras" disguised as pocket watches, hats, or other objects.

The shortened exposure times that made candid photography possible also necessitated another innovation, the mechanical shutter. The very first shutters were separate accessories, though built-in shutters were common by around the start of the 20th century

Daguerreotypes and calotypes

Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (who was Daguerre's partner, but died before their invention was completed) invented the first practical photographic method, which was named the daguerreotype, in 1836. Daguerre coated a copper plate with silver, then treated it with iodine vapor to make it sensitive to light. The image was developed by mercury vapor and fixed with a strong solution of ordinary salt (sodium chloride). Henry Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. Both used cameras that were little different from Zahn's model, with a sensitized plate or sheet of paper placed in front of the viewing screen to record the image. Focusing was generally via sliding boxes.

Early fixed images

The first partially successful photograph of a camera image was made in approximately 1816 by Nicéphore Niépce using a very small camera of his own making and a piece of paper coated with silver chloride, which darkened where it was exposed to light. No means of removing the remaining unaffected silver chloride was known to Niépce, so the photograph was not permanent, eventually becoming entirely darkened by the overall exposure to light necessary for viewing it. Later, in 1826, he used a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris, France. He made his first permanent camera photograph in 1826 by coating a pewter plate with bitumen and exposing the plate in this camera. The bitumen hardened where light struck. The unhardened areas were then dissolved away. This photograph still survives.

The camera obscura

Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device dating back to the ancient Chinese and ancient Greeks, which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a viewing surface.

Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied this matter. Bacon's notes and drawings, published as Perspectiva in 1267, are partly clouded with theological material describing how the Devil can insinuate himself through the pinhole by magic,and it is not clear whether or not he produced such a device. On 24 January 1544 mathematician and instrument maker Reiners Gemma Frisius of Leuven University used one to watch a solar eclipse, publishing a diagram of his method in De Radio Astronimica et Geometrico in the following year. In 1558 Giovanni Batista della Porta was the first to recommend the method as an aid to drawing.
Before the invention of photographic processes there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. The earliest cameras were room-sized, with space for one or more people inside; these gradually evolved into more and more compact models such as that by Niépce's time portable handheld cameras suitable for photography were readily available. The first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography was envisioned by Johann Zahn in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before such an application was possible.

History of the camera

The history of the camera can be traced much further back than the introduction of photography. Photographic cameras evolved from the camera obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic technology, including daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film, and digital cameras.

Photography is Born

In 1839 Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, a French scientist and William Henry Fox Talbot, a British scholar, independently announced the invention of photography.

CAMERA HISTORY

On February 24, actor Blair Underwood appeared in an episode of NBC’s genealogy documentary series,

Who Do You Think You Are?, which was filmed in part in the Library of Virginia’s West Reading Room and Special Collections Reading Room.

Now in its second season, Who Do You Think You Are? was adapted from the British series of the same name, aired by the BBC. Each week a celebrity embarks on a journey to trace his or her family tree and uncovers some hidden stories or family secrets along the way.

In this episode, Petersburg native Underwood—an actor, director, and producer known for television shows

such as The Event and In Treatment—uncovered a branch of his family tree that shows a line of free African Americans in Virginia stretching back to the 1820s.