Daguerreotype photography

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hotography has experienced many changes as it has evolved from Thomas Wedgwood’s early experimental captures of light and shadow in 1790 into today’s high-speed advanced digital capture.

In 1826, Joseph-Nicephore Niépce captured a picture of the street from his window. That exposure took eight hours to capture and is considered the earliest example of an actual photographic image.

Niépce became friends with an artist named Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. This artist grew very interested in photographic capture and by the time of Niépce’s death in 1833, Daguerre had learned quite a lot from his friend. By 1837 Daguerre had figured out a method by which images could be captured and produced consistently. This process known as the Daguerrotype consisted of treating silver-plated copper sheets with iodine to make them sensitive to light, then exposing them in a camera and “developing” the images with warm mercury vapor. This process allowed for the widespread production of photographs.

Now that almost everyone carries a high resolution camera with them in the form of a cell phone, these historic things are being forgotten through the ease of digital photography. But some hearty souls are helping to keep this history alive. One such artist is Dan Carrillo: