Camera Obscura  

Camera obscura is when the rays of light pass through a small hole into a dark space and shows an image where they hit the surface, which makes in an inverted and reversed projection of the view outside. And because this camera obscura uses a lens, which creates a relatively large aperture, you get a sharp, colourful image on the paper.  

Nicephore Niepce 

Nicephore Niepce was the first person to make camera obscura a permanent image, which is now the oldest photograph ever made. However he was unwilling to give any specific details about how he made the photo, therefore the royal society rejected it. Then before he suddenly passed away he gave his specimens to Baure. 

• enhanced version of Nicephore Niepces first photo

Henry Fox Talbot

Cameraless images were another version of photography. He used a sheet of fine writing paper, coated with salt and brushed with a solution of silver nitrate, Henry Talbot found that the paper would darkened in the sun. He set a pressed leaf or plant on a piece of sensitized paper, covered it with a sheet of glass, and set it in the sun. If it was light outside the paper darkened, but wherever the plant blocked the light, it remained white. This is now called photogenic drawing.

The mousetraps are sturdy little wooden boxes with a brass tube housing a lens at one end, and a sliding wooden panel at the other. Into the wooden panel at the back Talbot would stick a piece of normal writing paper that he had made chemically sensitive to light. On some you can still see the traces where successive pieces of paper have been stuck in place.

However, While Talbot quietly continued his experiments, he discovered that he had a rival. In January 1839, Louis Daguerre was finding own method for fixing the shadows.

Daguerreotype

Daguerreotype is a direct-positive process, creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative. The process required great care. The silver-plated copper plate had first to be cleaned and polished until the surface looked like a mirror. The daguerreotype process made it possible to capture the image seen inside a camera obscura and preserve it as an object. It was the first practical photographic process and ushered in a new age of pictorial possibility.

Richard Maddox

Richard Maddox invented lightweight gelatine negative plates for photography in 1871.  photographers could use commercial dry plates off the shelf instead of having to prepare their own emulsions in a mobile darkroom. Negatives did not have to be developed immediately.