Thanks to Kodak’s cellulose acetate process – or “safety film” – introduced in 1908, the hazardous nitrate film slowly weeded itself out of production, despite being tougher, cheaper and slightly more transparent. This film roll was actually a coating on a paper base, and the first transparent plastic film roll – also known as nitrate film, a highly flammable (yikes) material – soon followed in 1889. Jump to 1885, and the first flexible photographic roll of film was sold by George Eastman. In fact, up until the early 2000s, glass plates were still used for astrophotography and electron micrography – making it a special use case in the name of science. Although fragile and heavy, this 1850s glass-based process offered better quality and at the time was relatively cheap. This resulted in an incredibly long exposure – about an hour – to produce an acceptable negative.įast forward about a decade, and thin glass plates coated with photographic emulsion became the new standard material for use in cameras. This process of ‘printing-out,’ required the paper to be exposed inside the camera until the image was fully visible. Then in 1841, a new process called calotype (stemming from the Greek word kalos, meaning “beautiful” and tupos, meaning “impression”) was introduced by a gent named William Henry Fox Talbo. Hey, you’ve got to make do with what you’ve got, right? The process was called daguerreotype, which sounds like more like a monster from the upside down in an episode of Stranger Things than a photography term. Rather, the earliest practical photographic process used light-sensitive chemicals to form on the surface of a silver-plated copper sheet. It all began in 1839, only it didn’t use film to start. So to honor the picturesque path that gave us polaroids, one-hour photo shops, digital cameras and made the term “Instagramable” possible, we’re going to go back to where it all began. The term photography stems from the Greek words (what word doesn’t root back to Greek, right?) photos, or phos, meaning “light” and graphein, or graphe, meaning “to draw.” That means, “to draw with light” is the literal translation (and a cool one at that) coined in the 1830s to describe the new technology that would forever change how we commemorate moments in time.
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