Camera-less imagery~A tribute to the Founding Fathers of photography.

Calotype Negative and Daguerreotype Photography ~ ^{_{Images from Pinterest and Smithsonian Magazine respectively.}}

In the first three decades of the 19th Century, a handful of talented men in England and in France laid down the basic technology of photography in an astonishing burst of inventiveness. Working independently for the most part, these men bought together the principles of optics and chemistry that made photography possible- specifically, the use of glass lens to transmitt light and focus an image, coupled with light sensitive medium to record the image. Their work was a blend of old and new technologies, their success accomplished through patience trial and error. The optic knowledge required for photographs had been around for centuries in the form of the camera obscurant, a devise used by artists to project an image from life that they could trace. Originally the camera obscure was a darkened room with a hole…