The AM Forum

It comes from 1838 and was taken by Louis Daguerre himself. He writes there were probably people wandering through this scene on that day, but if they didn’t stay still, the camera would have missed them. Only one man shows up. He is on the sidewalk down on the lower left of the photo.

To achieve this image, he exposed a chemically treated metal plate for ten minutes. Others were walking or riding in carriages down that busy street that day, but because they moved, they didn't show up. Only this guy stood still long enough — maybe to have his boots shined — to leave an image.

Other primitive forms of photography had preceded this picture by over a decade. But this anonymous shadowy man is the first human being to ever have his picture taken, totally unaware that he was making history that day.


(http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2010/10/22/first-human-picture-2.jpg?t=1287769476&s=3)


Read the full story here.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130754296&ps=cprs

Very cool.

I remember a while back (probably 20 years ago) in Rochester NY some students I knew at RIT were experimenting with big pin hole cameras. They would use large sheets of photographic paper and hang them and expose them for 5-20 minutes at a time with a carefully sized pinhole. Then they would develop the sheet and use it as a negative with a bright light source to expose a matching sheet as the final print. They were doing it because it offered very accurate spatial representation compared to a lens based camera. Not to mention the cool factor. I remember reading an article where special pinhole cameras were used to map the cockpits of aircraft for use in redesigning them or studying the human factors in them because of the spatial accuracy.

One setup used the wall of a classroom opposite the windows as the exposure plane, and was used to take pictures of the campus. A portable camera was a trailer with a 4x6 back wall opposite the pinhole. The operator was sealed inside the camera box and tacked up the photo paper against the back wall and ran the shutter by unsealing the pinhole port and sitting to one side while it exposed the paper, then sealing it up and changing paper for the next shot. Compatriots on the outside would aim the whole trailer assembly with a pair of sights. I remember seeing some prints of Conesus lake taken from a hill overlooking the lake valley that was very nice.

Cool tech.

I was making what I called time exposed "positive negatives" back in 1962 when I was 12 years old and was playing around with printing black & white pictures.  I used a Kodak camera that the printing paper would fit exactly where the film went.  Brings back memories. . .

When I was in high school back in the late 60's I hooked a couple cheap Brownie cameras to a piece of metal and used a homemade synchronized shutter deal to get new exposures so I could glue them on a card and view them in an old Stereopticon.

They came out pretty good, even in color.

When I was a kid, probably around 1962 or so, my parents had a stereo camera made by Lionel (of model train and geiger counter fame) that ran on 16 mm film and came complete with a stereo viewer. I guess you would send the film in to be processed and it would come back as paired up slides on special strip that ran through the viewer. I played with that thing for days and tried at various places to get film for it but nobody knew anything about the film or where to get it.

Ah, the wonders of google. http://www.submin.com/16mm/collection/linex/index.htm (http://www.submin.com/16mm/collection/linex/index.htm)

A few years later, I looked for it again when I knew more about cameras and found my mom had thrown it out! (I wonder if that experience and others where my cleanliness minded mom was constantly throwing out 'treasures' is why I can't seem to part with any radio junk these days.  ;D )

Seems like a lot of hams I've bumped into through the years have more than a nodding acquaintance with photography.

I have heard  that story over and over again about the young ham who goes off to university or got called to military service, and upon return, finds that his parents had thrown out all his radio "junk" while he was gone.

I read somewhere that it is likely the first photo of a human being
was taken during the Medieval times and is presently known as
"The Shroud of Turin." So I did a bit of googling:

http://www.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=7268

https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/bitstream/2263/14525/1/Mare_Science(1999).pdf

Peter

a different process?

I think it's amazing the clarity and sharpness in a black and white picture.
Too bad the industry drifted away from making B&W film.
I read that movie makers had to work more to achieve the desired affect when they converted to color photography or movie making.

Fred

Daguerreotypes have much better resolution than film. A shot taken with a good quality lens can be examined with a magnifying glass and it's almost the equivalent of looking through a telescope. The resolution is said to be equivalent to that of a digital camera at 140,000 mega-pixels.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_daguerrotype_panorama/