Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing, and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.
Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. Paper texture effects in calotype photography limit the ability of this early process to record low contrast details and textures. The term calotype comes from the Ancient Greek καλός, "beautiful", and τύπος, "impression".
Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography. The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio, like the familiar letterbox format in wide-screen video.
Mathew B. Brady was one of the earliest photographers in American history. Best known for his scenes of the Civil War, he studied under inventor Samuel Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York City in 1844, and photographed John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, among other public figures.
The American Civil War was the most widely covered conflict of the 19th century. The images would provide posterity with a comprehensive visual record of the war and its leading figures, and make a powerful impression on the populace. Something not generally known by the public is the fact that roughly 70% of the war's documentary photography was captured by the twin lenses of a stereo camera. The American Civil War was the first war in history whose intimate reality would be brought home to the public, not only in newspaper depictions, album cards and cartes-de-visite, but in a popular new 3D format called a "stereograph," "stereocard" or "stereoview." Millions of these cards were produced and purchased by a public eager to experience the nature of warfare in a whole new way.
A toy camera is a simple, inexpensive film camera.
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
Ansco was the brand name of a photographic company based in Binghamton, New York, which produced photographic films, papers and cameras from the mid-19th century until the 1980s.
James Presley Ball, Sr. was a prominent African-American photographer, abolitionist, and businessman.
Edward Anthony was an American photographer and one of the founders of E. & H. T. Anthony & Company which was the largest manufacturer and distributor of photographic supplies in the United States during the 19th century. Edward Anthony was a brother of Henry T. Anthony and had a very close business relationship with Mathew Brady.
Bourne & Shepherd was an Indian photographic studio and one of the oldest established photographic businesses in the world. Established in 1863, at its peak, it was the most successful commercial firm in 19th-and early 20th-century India, with agencies all over India, and outlets in London and Paris, and also ran a mail order service. A devastating fire in 1991 destroyed much of the studio's photographic archive and resulted in a severe financial loss to the firm. The long-term impact of the fire, legal difficulties with the Indian government, which owned the studio building, and the increasing dominance of digital technology, finally forced the studio's closure in June 2016. At its closure, the studio had operated continuously for 176 years.
The Boston Camera Club is the leading amateur photographic organization in Boston, Massachusetts and vicinity. Founded in 1881, it offers activities of interest to amateur photographers, especially digital photography. The club has activities year-round, but the main porgrams run from September to June. Membership is by annual dues for regular members, families or students. Anyone may join and meetings are open for guests.
John Plumbe Jr. was a Welsh-born American entrepreneurial photographer, gallerist, publisher, and an early advocate of an American transcontinental railroad in the mid-19th century. He established a franchise of photography studios in the 1840s in the U.S., with additional branches in Paris and Liverpool. He created a lithographic process for reproducing photographic images, called the "plumbeotype."
Henry Tiebout Anthony was an American photographer and the vice president of the E. & H. T. Anthony & Company, which was the largest manufacturer and distributor of photographic supplies in the United States during the 19th century. Henry Anthony was a brother of Edward Anthony and had a close business relationship with Mathew Brady.
Frederick August Wenderoth or F. A. Wenderoth was a German-born American painter and photographer. Born and educated in Cassel, where he first learned to paint from his father, he established a lifelong friendship with Charles Christian Nahl at school. During the 1840s period of political upheaval in Hesse, he moved to Paris, where he was joined by Nahl and his half-brother Arthur Nahl.
Frederick Gutekunst was an American photographer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He opened his first photographic portrait studio with his brother in 1854 and successfully ran his business for sixty years. He grew to national prominence during the American Civil War and expanded his business to include two studios and a large phototype printing operation. He is known as the "Dean of American Photographers" due to his high quality portraits of dignitaries and celebrities. He worked as the official photographer of the Pennsylvania Railroad and received national and international recognition for his photographs of the Gettysburg battlefield and an innovative 10-foot long panoramic photograph of the Centennial Exposition.
The practice and appreciation of photographyin the United States began in the 19th century, when various advances in the development of photography took place and after daguerreotype photography was introduced in France in 1839. The earliest commercialization of photography was made in the country when Alexander Walcott and John Johnson opened the first commercial portrait gallery in 1840. In 1866, the first color photograph was taken. Only in the 1880s, would photography expand to a mass audience with the first easy-to-use, lightweight Kodak camera, issued by George Eastman and his company.
Daniel DeWitt Tompkins Davie, also known as D. D. T. Davie, was an American 19th-century photographer known as a pioneer of the daguerreotype in America and an innovator of photographic equipment and techniques. He was a key player in the controversy over Levi Hill's claim to have invented a process for producing color daguerreotypes.
This is a timeline of women in photography tracing the major contributions women have made to both the development of photography and the outstanding photographs they have created over the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
