This gorgeous cornerstone volume, created in collaboration with the world-famous George Eastman House, celebrates the camera and the art of the photograph. It spans almost two hundred years of progress, from the first faint image ever caught to the instantaneous pictures snapped by today’s state-of-the-art digital equipment.
n 1848, Charles Fontayne and William Porter produced one of the most famous photographs in the history of the medium — a panorama spanning some 2 miles of Cincinnati waterfront. They did it with eight 6.5- by 8.5-inch daguerreotype plates, a then-new technology that in skilled hands displays mind-blowing resolution.
Fontayne and Porter were definitely skilled, but no one knew just how amazing their images were until three years ago, when conservators at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, began restoration work on the deteriorating plates. Magnifying glasses didn’t exhaust their detail; neither did an ultrasharp macro lens. Finally, the conservators deployed a stereo microscope. What they saw astonished them: The details — down to window curtains and wheel spokes — remained crisp even at 30X magnification. The panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity; a digicam would have to record 140,000 megapixels per shot to match that. Under the microscope, the plates revealed a vanished world, the earliest known record of an urbanizing America.
Daguerreotypes start as copper plates with a thin, mirror-polished coating of silver that’s been exposed to halogen gas (iodine or bromine) to make silver halide. Light hitting this compound knocks an electron loose, which attaches to a silver ion, forming a neutral silver atom. The result is that all the places on the plate exposed to light are clusters of pure silver, and the rest is silver halide.
Ross Messing, Xiaoqing Tang, Paul Ardis
Next, the exposed plate is held over a warm pool of mercury (don’t breathe!). The mercury combines with the silver atoms, creating the equivalent of a digital image’s pixel: a tiny “grain” between 150 and 800 nanometers in diameter that scatters light, making areas of the surface that were exposed to more light appear brighter. Finally, the plate is soaked in sodium thiosulfate, which washes away the unexposed silver halide, leaving dark regions — the image’s blacks and grays.
Now Fontayne and Porter’s daguerreotypes are stabilized and its details restored — 21st-century technology rescued an image from the 19th. The Cincinnati Public Library plans to make a zoomable version available online in the next year.
Photos: Daguerreotypes courtesy of the Public Library of Cinninnati and Hamilton County
The informative narrative by Todd Gustavson traces the camera’s development, the lives of its brilliant but often eccentric inventors, and the artists behind the lens. Images and highly descriptive captions for more than 350 cameras from the George Eastman House Collection, plus more than 100 historic photos, ads, and drawings, complement the text.
A foreword by the George Eastman House Director Anthony Bannon, and insightful essays by Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, and Alexis Gerard, visionary founder and president of Future Image Inc., completes this illuminating study of one of the greatest modern technological achievements.
Photos: Daguerreotypes courtesy of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
To match these daguerreotypes a digital camera would have to capture 140,000 megapixels. The whole panorama could be blown up to 170 x 20 and still remain crisp. Something I found fascinating was even though the image of the clock face was only 1 millimeter across the resolution was high enough to still tell the time, the picture was taken at 1:55pm and in 1945 using steamboat records to find the date when all the steamboats were in Cincinnati they determined it was September 24, 1848.
Photos: Daguerreotypes courtesy of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
Wired magazine explains the process,
"Daguerreotypes start as copper plates with a thin, mirror-polished coating of silver that’s been exposed to halogen gas (iodine or bromine) to make silver halide. Light hitting this compound knocks an electron loose, which attaches to a silver ion, forming a neutral silver atom. The result is that all the places on the plate exposed to light are clusters of pure silver, and the rest is silver halide.
Next, the exposed plate is held over a warm pool of mercury (don’t breathe!). The mercury combines with the silver atoms, creating the equivalent of a digital image’s pixel: a tiny “grain” between 150 and 800 nanometers in diameter that scatters light, making areas of the surface that were exposed to more light appear brighter. Finally, the plate is soaked in sodium thiosulfate, which washes away the unexposed silver halide, leaving dark regions — the image’s blacks and grays.
The result is a one-of-a-kind direct positive — as opposed to the negative produced by modern chemical photography — with a haunting, soft, almost three-dimensional quality. Look at a daguerreotype from the wrong angle and you’ll see only a reflection: The image is trapped inside the mirrored surface."
Photos: Daguerreotypes courtesy of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
Its mind boggling how crisp and clear these pictures are considering how old they are.
It is astonishing that after 175 years the daguerreotype still beats both film and digital photography in its ability to capture image detail. As an example, take a look at the “Cincinnati Panorama of 1848.” It shows a two mile section of the city waterfront taken from across the Ohio River. The panorama is made up of eight relatively small 6.5 x 8.5 inch silver plates, yet they each contain an amazing amount of detail. With a microscope you can read store signs and count the number of bricks in a wall, as you shown in the photo above.That’s far better rendition of detail than even the best digital camera is capable of capturing.
A section of the Cincinnati Panorama that is in the Gallery in full
How is this possible? For the answer we can compare how the different processes capture images. Film photography utilizes light sensitive silver crystals suspended in an emulsion to do the job. Light reaches the crystals and turns them into bits of silver. Particularly if you have taken photos with fast films you’ve seen the clumps of exposed silver called “grain.” Grain is the limiting factor in recording detail.
Digital photographs, on the other hand, are made up of millions of discrete bits of information from the sensor pixels. The pixel, like grain, limit the amount of detail you can get in an image. If you enlarge a digital image file to just 4x its normal size (800%), the image becomes millions of tiny colored squares. Daguerreotype images have been examined with microscopes and even at 30x magnification, the images are sharp and crisp.
pixels
The resolution of a digital photo is limited by these pixel squares. While the 70 gigabyte photo of Budapest, that I reported on in my previous PIXIQ post, contains almost the amount of detail of the Cincinnati panorama, it was made by stitching together thousands of individual digital images. The daguerreotypists achieved this level of detail in every single one of their exposures.
A panoramic view of San Francisco
How does this happen? Daguerreotypes are copper plates that were clad in pure silver by a process called cold-rolled cladding. Silver foil was heated and rolled in contact with a copper plate producing a surface that was .999 pure silver. The plate was then “sensitized” by placing it in the fumes of iodine vapors which resulted in the formation of silver iodide on the plate's surface. The image is then the result of the interaction of photons of light with the sensitived surface.
The first photo of a person (in the lower left) by Daguerre 1838, Paris
The “development” process for daguerreotypes was dangerous and often fatal. After the plate was exposed in the camera, it was developed in mercury fumes rising from a pool of heated mercury. This made the image an amalgam, an alloy, of mercury and silver. Unfortunately, mercury fumes are deadly and the “dark rooms” and 'dark tents' of the mid-1840s were not ventilated. This resulted in death or madness for many would be 19th century photographers.
Because the processed image is an amalgam there is no “grain.” The image is literally stored on a molecular level and that’s why the 163 year old Cincinnati Panorama daguerreotype of 1848 has such incredible detail.
One day perhaps our digital cameras will be able to do the same.
For a closer look at the astonishing Cincinnati Panorama of 1848 go to the Herald's website and click on the image in the story and you'll get to the really big picture.
The Cincinnati Riverfront Panorama of 1848: A Window
to the Past at the Main Library
On September 24, 1848, Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter set up their camera on a rooftop in Newport, Kentucky and panned it across the Ohio River capturing on eight separate plates a two-mile span of nation’s sixth largest city, Cincinnati. While Fontayne and Porter knew their project was an ambitious one, they could not have imagined that the Panorama would survive more than 160 years as the oldest comprehensive photograph of an American city, be revered worldwide as one of the finest examples of daguerrean photography, and form the basis for 21st century discoveries about 19th century American life.
The invention of the first practical method of photography, the daguerreotype, by Louis Daguerre was considered a scientific wonder. While expensive and difficult to create, daguerreotypes were noted for their superior level of clarity, exceeding later photographic methods. In 2006, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County contracted with the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film to perform conservation work on the Panorama. As part of the preservation project, state-of-the-art digital microscopy equipment produced digital images from the 1848 Panorama. By combining the clarity of the original object with 21st century technology, the digitally enlarged Panorama revealed previously unseen details of American life including close-ups of river life, the urban landscape, and people at work and play, turning the masterpiece into a virtual time machine.
It’s hard for me to imagine what life must have been like before the camera was invented.
We’re all so used to being flooded with images every day that we don’t realize how comparatively scarce pictures were before the 20th century. Artists were unique in society for their ability to create images and essentially had a monopoly on art.
That monopoly ended abruptly in 1826 with the creation of the world’s first photograph by Joseph Niépce.
As you can see, it looks nothing like photographs today. It was taken from a second story window yet you can barely make out the rooftops of the adjacent buildings. Niépce’s photo is much more of a science experiment than an art form, and of course he didn’t take the picture by just pushing a button. Exposure time took more than 8 hours while the picture slowly formed on a pewter plate. Despite its crudeness, Niépce’s success led to a revolution in art.
Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre created the first true camera soon after, based on Neipce’s scientific discoveries. Big and clumsy, these awkward boxes required not only a good knowledge of chemistry, but also the willingness to lug around heavy metal plates (instead of film) and a veritable apothecary of chemicals, beakers, test tubes, and other necessary equipment.
Despite the hassle, the eerily perfect images that were created seemed closer to magic than anything else, and took the world by storm. Daguerreotype portraits were especially popular since up until then portraits had only been available to the rich. Eventually, for just a few dollars anyone could have a “painting” of themselves.
This self-portrait of Robert Cornelius is similar to many pictures taken during the height of the daguerrotype’s popularity. More can be found here as part of the Library of Congress’s daguerrotype collection.
Throughout the 19th century, photography was a tricky undertaking even for professionals, but with the invention of film the world changed once again.
Film replaced bulky metal plates and allowed cameras to be much smaller and more manageable for anyone to operate. By 1888 Kodak had made its first film camera and in 1901 the American public could buy a Kodak Brownie. It was the very first uncomplicated point-and-shoot camera. Simple, affordable, and so easy to use that practically everyone had to have one.
Does that last part sound familiar?
I think in a lot of ways the digital camera revolution we are experiencing today is very similar to what was happening then.
We have digital cameras in our cell phones, digital cameras on our key chains, even disposable digital cameras. Every year they get easier and more convenient. TheSony Cybershot for example now has a 3″ LCD preview screen even though it’s only 3-¾” wide. That was unthinkable just a few years ago.
New advances in technology also help us take better pictures, or at least eliminate some of the easy errors that can crop up. Several FujiFilm cameras now are installed with face recognition software for perfect auto-focusing every time.
Making pictures has become so ridiculously simple that we have to wonder where it leaves us; artists whose livelihood depend on making images? Like the portrait painters of the early 1900’s, will our skills become unnecessary as technology makes us obsolete?
I doubt it.
After all, painting survived the rise of the camera, although many predicted it wouldn’t.
And no matter how incredible camera technology becomes, at least there will always be a need for artists to push that button. Or, I suppose, to delete a lot of bad photos.
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