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Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras was improved by enlarging the hole used in the cameras.
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Camera obscuras became frequently used by artists. They eventually became portable in the form of sedan chairs.
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Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver together and notices that the side of the flask exposed to sunlight darkens. He had accidentally created the first photo-sensitive compound.
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Thomas Wedgewood makes "sun pictures" by putting opaque objects on leather that was coated with silver nitrate. The images he created would deteriorate quickly if exposed to light stronger than candle light.
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Joseph Nicephore Niepce was the first to make a photograph using the camera obscura. He created "sun prints" by allowing the light to draw the picture. Creating the image required hours of exposure and development, but the picture faded very quickly.
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Louis Daguerre, working with Niepce, created the daguerreotype as a more effective method of photography. This idea again essentially allowed the light to draw the image but used silver chloride to make an image that was lasting and would not change if exposed to light.
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Henry Fox Talbot invented the first negative that allowed multiple positive prints to be produced from it. After being perfected, this paper-negative process was called a calotype.
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Henry Fox Talbot patented his process of creating negative images officially under the name "calotype."
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Frederick Scott Archer invented the wet plate negative by using glass as the surface for the development of the photos. While wet plates led to advancements in photography, they still posed a problem to photographers in the field. Since wet plates had to be developed quickly, many photographers had to carry portable darkrooms with them.
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Adolphe Disderi developed carte-de-visite photography in Paris, France. This eventually ledd to the worldwide boom in potrait studios for the next decade.
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Hamilton Smith patented tintypes this year. Tintypes were another type of medium that used a thin sheet of iron to provide a base for light-sensitive material to create a positive image.
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Scottish physicit James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system that involved three black and white photos. Each one was taken through a red, green, or blue filter, turned into lantern slides, and projected with the same color filters. This became known as the "color separation" method.
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Mathew Brady along with many staff members cover the American Civil War and take thousands of photographs. They eventually developed 7,000 negatives.
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This was the time when the US Congress sent photographers farther west in the country. The most famous photographers were William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.
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Richard Leach Maddox was an English doctor who was the first to propose the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate. This process would eventually become known as the dry plate process.
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Wratten and Wainwright manufactured collodion glass plates and gelatin dry plates. wratten also invented the noodling process and eventually also created the first panoramic plates in England.
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In 1879, a glass negative plate with a dried gelatin emmulsion was created. These plates could be stored for longer periods of time, so photographers in the field no longer needed to carry darkrooms around with them. Dry plates could also obsorb light more quickly.
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George Eastman set up the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. This was also the year that the first half-tone photo appeared in a newspaper called the New York Graphic.
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In 1889, George Eastman created a new type of film that was so flexible that it could be rolled. The camera that was created in 1888 was a wooden, light-tight box that had a simple lens and shutter.
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The first Kodak camers is created with a 20-foot roll of paper. This was enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
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A new Kodak is introduced that has a roll of film instead of paper.
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Oskar Barnack wanted to lessen the format of film negatices and then enlarge the photographs after they had been exposed.
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Panoramic black and white film becomes available, so, as a result, higher quality color separation color photography becomes available.
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The first commercial color film is manufactured by the Lumiere brothers in France. They were called Autochrome plates.
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Oskar Barnack developed a camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film. Barnack worked for a German microscope manufacturer called Leitz.
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Man Ray began making photograms, which were aso called rayographs, by placing objects on photographic paper. The shadow cast by a distant light bulb was then exposed.
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Leitz marketed a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially and called it the "leica." This was the first high quality 35mm camera.
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Fuji Film was founded in 1934. They had grown so much in four years that by 1938, the company was already making cameras, lenses, and film for the general public.
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The Kodachrome was developed, and it was the first color multi-layered film. In addition, the pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex camera, also called the SLR, was developed named Exakta.
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Edwin Hervert Land was an American inventor who created a one-step process for developing and printing pictures. Then, in November 1948, the first polaroid camera was created and sold to the public.