Brief history of the Photograph
- excerpted from Encyclopedia Britiania -
The first photograph that was achieved in a camera was 1826 France by Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce. He later partnered with L.J.M.Daguerre in 1829, but was dead by 1833.
Daguerre's "tin-types" first appeared in 1839 France and were popular to about 1860. Made on a copper plate, a brass mat, covering of glass, and edge seal were required to prevent oxidation of the silver image. Due to excessively long expose times, they were impractical for portrait photography.
Talbot's paper negatives and prints replacing metal backed photos with paper ones were first introduced in 1840 Britain.
The wet glass-plate process was introduced in 1851. Exposed while wet, the plates had to be developed immediately in portable dark rooms. This was the principle process in the 1850s and 1860s.
Smith's "tintype" process was patented in 1856, they were popular until the early 1900s. Made on a piece of iron, most are brownish in color. Most were varnished to protect the surface, it is the varnish - not the surface that is often seen cracking today. Low cost and quick development times made them extremely popular.
The Kodak box camera appeared in 1888, launching the amateur photography craze.
Although Talbot made the first "flash photograph" in 1851 using a bright spark from a Leyden jar (forerunner of the storage battery), the first flash bulb was not marketed until 1940.
The "strobe" flash, which can produce high-intensity burst in as little as 1/1,000,000 of a second was developed by Harold Eugene Edgeton in 1926.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
"You're Kidding"
Posted by Maureen
Kathy Culbert owns this carte de visite captioned "Dora and Frank" and is having trouble dating it.
Children's clothing can be confusing. Mothers often dressed boys like girls until they were school age, but you can tell the difference by their hair. Girls had center parts; boys had side parts.
Here, the boy (on the right) wears knickerbocker-style pants, high laced boots and an upswept hairstyle from the 1860s. The big curl in the center of his head was actually the fashion.
His sister's dress has a ruffled yoked bodice and bows along the hemline. She also wears high boots. Girls' attire mimicked that of adult women, so compare it to dresses in books such as Dressed for the Photographer by Joan Severa (Kent State University Press, $65).
A good source for dating kids' clothing is JoAnne Olian's Children's Fashions 1860-1912 (Dover, $12.95). It features fashion plates from the 19th-century magazine La Mode Illustree. Designs similar to these outfits appear in plates from 1867.
The rest of the details in this image confirm this date. Tax Stamps indicate photos were taxed from Aug. 1, 1864 to Aug. 1, 1866. The lack of a tax stamp on the back of this photo means it was taken earlier or later than those years. The girl's clothing is evidence for post-1866. The double gold-line border dates it to between 1861 and 1869.
Culbert can verify the identities of Dora and Frank by studying her family tree for children of these names during the late 1860s. I'd estimate their ages here as 6 and 4, based on their attire and face shapes. Frank, especially, still has a round baby face.
By the way, the kids' stiff stances aren't due to nerves. Look at their feet. Braces, barely visible behind these children, clasp them around their waists. Photographers often used braces to keep fidgety children still.