Category: Photography

  • The Introduction Of Collodion

    THE next important advance in the chemical department of photography, after the introduction of albumen on glass plates, was the invention of the collodion process. Collodion is a viscid compound composed of soluble pyroxyline dissolved in ether, to which alcohol is added. When poured upon a plate of glass it runs freely over the surface, […]

  • Lenses

    IT has been shown that when light passes through a prism it is not only refracted, but dispersed ; and as lenses are, as it were, but a collection of prisms, we see the same effect produced by them. They will at once be perceived by referring to the diagram (Fig. 21), in which A […]

  • The Camera And Lenses

    STEP by step with the progress of photographic chemistry went on the development of the camera. Something has already been said about the camera obscura, from which the camera of the photographer took its rise. In this, the principal apparatus used in drawing by the pencil of light, we have nothing more nor less than […]

  • Photography On Paper And On Glass

    WHILE Niepce and Daguerre were perfecting their process, another investigator was working on similar lines, and arrived at like results by a different method. This was Henry Fox-Talbot, who is entitled to rank with the two Frenchmen as an independent discoverer in photography. Fox-Talbot was born at Laycock Abbey, Wilts, in the first year of […]

  • Daguerre And His Photographic Discoveries

    IN the meanwhile another Frenchman had been engaged in a similar line of investigation to that which had so long riveted Niepce’s attention. This was Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, to whom for many years was given the chief honor in connection with the discovery of photography. Daguerre was born at Cormeilles, a village in the […]

  • Niepce And Heliography

    THE next person to take up the subject of sun-pictures, and carry it forward from the point where Wedgwood and Davy had left it was a Frenchman named Niepce. Indeed, although his name was for years eclipsed by another, there is no doubt that to Niepce belongs the largest share of the honour due for […]

  • Wedgwood And Davy’s Experiments In Photography

    NOTHING further appears to have been done in regard to photography until Thomas Wedgwood, a son of the famous potter, took up the subject, and succeeded in producing a photograph by making use of Scheele’s observations on chloride of silver. He was, however, unable to fix his pictures, which blackened and disappeared as soon as […]

  • The Optics Of Photography

    PHOTOGRAPHY is the joint child of optics and chemistry. All that has been discovered about the influence of light upon the salts of silver and analogous substances might have been known, and yet, without the “dark chamber,” the art of photography would have remained non-existent. It may even be said that the prior discovery of […]

  • Photography And Art II

    THERE was a time when the art world used to sneer at photography. They said it was going to ruin art with its crude stiff facsimiles of objects, like enough to pass for the real thing, but in truth so bald and lifeless, and moreover, in general detail, so distorted and awry as to destroy […]

  • Photography And Art

    IT remains to say a few words on the all-important subject of art as connected with photography. There are those. who affirm that photography is not an art, and the photographer there-fore not an artist. Well, it is certainly true that every operator with the camera and the prepared plate is not an artist; but […]