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The first image which is
considered to be a photograph was produced in 1825 by Nicéphore Niepce. It
was produced with a camera, but it required 8 hours to sunshine. |
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After the Niepce way to
produce a photograph came the Daguerreotype. The Daguerreotype was invented
by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, a French artist and chemist. Daguerre had
worked and experimented many years to find a good process and he announced
the finished Daguerreotype in 1839.
The Daguerreotype was an image produced on to a mirror polished
surface of silver where only a positive image was produced (allowing no
reproduction of the pictures). |
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Louis Jaques
Mandé Daguerre |
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The process took a lot of
steps to produce a final image, but after it had been properly sealed the
image could last much longer than a paper image. The Daguerreotype wasn`t the
first photographic process, but it was one of the first ways to produce a
permanent image which didn`t fade away when exposed to light as did the
images of other, earlier processes. |
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The Daguerreotype proved
quite popular as there was a large demand from the middle class people for
portraiture during the industrial revolution. This demand might have been the
reason why the development of photography was pushed so much. |
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People often think that this
process was the most commonly used method in the 19th century but
in fact it was not, as it was a rather long process using a lot of time and
effort to receive the image and having people sit still for 60 – 90 seconds
while taking the photograph. In addition to time, another reason was cost, as
it was a rather expensive process, which not too many people could afford.
Because of all these points it was replaced after about 10 years by other
methods. Examples of other methods are |
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Photography became much
easier with the invention of a new kind of film that was flexible,
unbreakable and could be rolled. This kind of film was invented by George
Eastman in 1889. The invention of this kind of film, the introduction of the
Kodak Brownie camera in 1901 and the ease of film processing and printing
meant that the general public could easily take photographs. The first such
films were black and white but colour film was commercially available from
1940. |
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In 1913 the first 35mm film
camera was developed by Ur-Leica (a German company). When this camera was
first introduced it had to be used manually where everything had to be set by
the photographer e.g. focusing, exposure time, but during the rest of the 20th
century cameras became more and more automatic with the introduction of
electronics in cameras. However, for people who are very enthusiastic about
black and white photography today, basically nothing has changed in the
process since the introduction of the first Leica camera. |
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Other developments in the 20th
century were the invention of the flashbulb which is linked to the camera and
the invention of the Polaroid camera where the photo is developed immediately
after taking the photo. |
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The latest invention in
photography is the development of the digital camera which is gradually
replacing photography which uses the wet chemical processes of developing
film to produce photographs. |
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Photography played an
important part in world history. Through photography people had a true visual
image of what was going on in the world and were no longer fooled by artistic
impressions. Also, we now have the possibility to see how things really were
in the past by looking at photographs taken many years ago. |
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Rachel |