Early photography and painting

To expand my knowledge I need to look at what has been done before and also to consider the genesis of the photographic process, and how closely early photography related to painting. Largely due to William Henry Fox Talbot's (1800-77) frustration at being unable to draw or paint. At Lake Como, Italy in 1833, Fox Talbot found a way to fix the image with the camera lucida, which was an aid to drawing employed by painters including Vermeer and a popular gadget for the upper-class Victorian traveler. Many of Fox Talbot's photographic experiments took as inspiration subjects and views that were typical of painting and other related media.

1835, a positive from what may be the oldest existing negative

By placing a sheet of paper coated with light-sensitive silver salts in a camera and exposing it to light, Talbot produced, by further development, and fixing the latent camera image, a negative (callotype) of his subject. the negative, when placed in contact with a similarly sensitised paper and further exposed to light, inverted the values of the negative to produce the positive print.

This process remained central to the evolution of the medium.

In early decades (1840's to 1890's) the two-stage negative positive process underwent rapid technical and material advances, driven by tying to achieve and improve quality, and reduce the length of exposure time, which led to the introduction of the use of glass as the negative and 2 layer paper.

1870's saw the start of gelatin emulsion, which led to enlarging in the early 1900's when nitrate film was available to a wider audience. Initially used in film making, nitrate was the first commercially available, flexible, plasticized film base. As nitrate was flammable and chemically unstable, it's use was replaced with cellulose acetate.

1942, Kodac film was commercially available, like monochrome but with the inclusion of cyan blue, yellow and magenta dyes.

Nitrate was discontinued in the late 1940's, acetate remained in use to the early 1970's when it was replaced with polyester film.

Source: www.vam.ac.uk - Victoria & Albert Museum