The Daguerreotype and the first Photo of People

Together, Luis Daguerre and Joseph Niepce invented a new technique to develop a photo, they called it the Daguerreotype in 1837. The process required less exposure than Niepce original process that he created earlier and only used privately. The Daguerreotype, the first publicly announced photographing process, takes advantage of a fine combination of silver and mercury, or more accurately mercury vapor. Because the image was so fragile, in that it could be easily rubbed off of the mirror like plate it formed itself on, they were always and immediately kept in glass cases. A Daguerreotype is a non fixed image, meaning it is simply a substance resting on a surface (mercury vapor sitting on light exposed areas of a copper plate, more where there is the most exposure and less on the least exposed), so the obvious next step was to figure out how to fix the image to its base.

Ultimately, this process was very expensive and difficult for the average person to accomplish. It was quickly outdated by the "tintype" which is a direct positive on a sheet of iron metal that is blackened by painting, enameling is then used for photographic emulsion, and the Ambreotype which is a positive image on a sheet of glass using the "wet plate collodion process(glass plates with a photographic emulsion of silver halides suspended in gelatin)

The Daguerreotype is most well known for being the first photographic process that captured the human form. In 1838 Louis Daguerre, the co creator of the process itself, took a photo of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. Now, the most amazing part of this photograph, http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/HumanPhoto.jpg, is that whomever the person that was accidentally captured in it had to stand still for a significant amount of time in order to be seen at all. It appears that this person is getting their shoes shined or mimicking a 'Captain Morgan's" commercial. Recently there was a story run in the Yahoo news in regards to another early photo of people http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101027/od_yblog_upshot/very-early-photographic-images-of-humans-discovered.

It amazes me how these two men, Niepce and Dageurre, had the knowledge and drive to create a way to conserve well, the past. I am a photographer by trade www.jjisaacs.com , and I owe quite a bit to these men. They had the foresight to invent a process, see what needed to be done next and then they figured that out as well.










http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/the-first-photograph-of-a-human/65196/

http://www.hokumburg.com/2010/10/squail-of-day-september-8-th-2010-first.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101027/od_yblog_upshot/very-early-photographic-images-of-humans-discovered

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype