Faster plates, and celluloid film
In the 1870s many attempts were made to find a dry substitute for wet collodion so that plates could be prepared well in advance and developed long after exposure. The suggestion casually made in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, to suspend silver bromide in a gelatin emulsion led, in 1878, to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatin containing silver salts, an event that marked the beginning of the modern era of photography.
Gelatin plates were about 60 times more sensitive than collodion plates. The increased speed freed the camera from the tripod, and a great variety of small hand cameras that allowed photographers to take instantaneous snapshots became available at relatively low cost. Of these, the most popular was the Kodak camera, introduced by George Eastman in 1888.
Its simplicity greatly speeded the growth of amateur photography. In place of glass plates, it contained a roll of negative material sufficient for taking 100 circular pictures, each roughly 21/2 inches in diameter. After exposing the last negative, the entire camera was sent to one of the Eastman factories (Rochester, N.Y., or Harrow, Middlesex), where the roll was processed and printed. "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" was Eastman's description of the Kodak system.
At first, paper film was used in the camera. The gelatin layer containing the image was stripped away after development and fixing and transferred to a transparent support. In 1889 it was replaced by film on a transparent plastic base of nitrocellulose that had been developed by the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, N.J., in 1887.
Instantaneous Photography
Stereoscopic Photography
Stereography - making pairs of '3D' images - was first described in 1832 (before photography) by the English physicist Charles Wheatstone. Stereoscopic photographs were originally taken by sliding the camera to one side after the first exposure, before taking a second picture from a slightly different viewpoint. From 1856 twin-lens cameras were available. These photographs gave a remarkable effect of three dimensions when viewed through a stereoscope.
Wheatstone's mirror stereoscope languished until the Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster designed a simplified viewing instrument, which was exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, London. Queen Victoria was entranced by the stereo daguerreotypes she saw there, and with the introduction of the collodion process, which simplified exposure and printing techniques, three-dimensional photography became a popular craze.
In 1854 the London Stereoscopic Company was formed. Their chief photographer was William England, whose lively street scenes of New York City in rainy weather and views of Niagara Falls taken in 1859 were the wonders of the day.The instantaneous street scenes, which showed pedestrians and vehicles stopped in their tracks, were made possible because the small size of the stereo-camera reduced exposure times to less than half a second. To minimize movement street views were usually taken from a first-floor window with the camera focused directly down the street. Between 1860 and about 1920 a stereo viewer was almost as ubiquitous in British, European and American homes (where a simplified and cheap hand viewer - shown below - was introduced by Oliver Wendell Holmes) as the television set is today.
Millions of stereographs (or stereoviews) were circulated in the years before newspaper reproduction of photographs, and their impact was enormous. In the early 1900s, some stereoviews (sample above) were published as postcards.
Colour Photography
I
n 1861 James Clerk Maxwell photographed a still subject (a tartan bow) through three different colour filters - red, green, and blue - onto three black-and-white negatives. He then made positve black-and-white transparencies, and projected them through red/green/blue filters with three magic lanterns, superimposing the images. The result was a full-colour picture on the screen. This was the first demonstration of a natural-colour photograph. A similar method was used by Frederick Ives in the 1890s to produce triple plates for his Kromoskop viewer, which again superimposed all three images, this time in a viewing box - although projection was also possible. The first commercially successful method for producing colour photographs on a single support (on glass plates, mainly for lightbox viewing) was the Lumière Autochrome system, introduced in 1907. The starch grains gave a pleasing 'pointilist' effect.
Example right: Autochrome: A u g u s t e L é o n, 1913.
coll.Le département des Hauts-de-Seine
The term instantaneous photography is loosely used, and in the 19th century generally meant exposures of less than one second. By the 1850s photographers were chemicaly manipulating their processes to attempt 'instantaneous' photographs, and by 1860 small format photographs - which concentrated the available light on a smaller area, thereby allowing shorter exposure times - of less than a quarter-second were being successfully produced (example below, 1859). The introduction of faster dry-plates around 1880 meant that exposures of 100th of a second and less became possible. Series of these photographs were taken, leading to the science of Chronophotography (time photography), allowing analysis of movements too fast to be seen clearly with the unaided eye. These sequences used technical developments that eventually led to cinematography.
