Friday, July 15, 2016

Nine Analog Photography Techniques you should know but probably don't, at least not all of them

 
Nicéphore Niépce, Point de vue du Gras, 1825 or 1827

Artsy is my favorite go to online art resource. They say this: Artsy features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. Our growing database of 350,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 50,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art. Artsy is used by art lovers, museum-goers, patrons, collectors, students, and educators to discover, learn about, and collect art. 

In today's Artsy email there is a piece written by Alexis Corral that takes the lid off nine analog photography techniques:  Heliography, Daguerreotype, Calotype, Wet Collodion Process, Color Separation Process, Photogravure, Silver Gelatin Process, Panchromaric Black and White Celluloid film and Autochrome Lumière.

For example they say this about the Daguerreotype: Niépce’s sudden death in 1833 prompted Louis Jacques-Mandé Daguerre to continue their collaborative experiments on his own and, by 1839, the French Académie des Sciences announced the daguerreotype as the first photographic technique freely available to the public. Within months, the method essentially went viral, introducing the one-of-a-kind positive image to the world as a new mode of communication.
Reducing exposure time from days to minutes, and then finally down to seconds, Daguerre’s analog technique was employed to produce millions of photographs in just one year alone. Used to capture everything from a boulevard scene to portraiture to studies of outer space, the daguerreotype granted photographers control over the exposure and developing processes. Daguerreotype images may appear perfectly silver in some parts, or naturally tarnished in others, resulting in a truly one-of-a-kind photograph. 

And they show this wonderful picture made in made in 1838 looking down into Boulevard du Temple in Paris. The photograph is the oldest surviving picture of a living person.


The full piece in Artsy is well worth a read. You can do so HERE and while you are at it you can go to their website HERE.

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