Since the Renaissance era, artists and inventors had searched for a mechanical method of capturing visual scenes. Using the camera obscura, artists would manually trace what they saw, or use the optical image as a … See more

A paragraph tacked onto the end of a review of one of Daguerre's Diorama spectacles in the Journal des artistes on 27 September 1835, a Diorama painting of a landslide that occurred in "La Vallée de Goldau", … See more

The camera obscura (Latin for "dark chamber") in its simplest form is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
A broad-leaved tree in bright sunshine will provide conditions that fulfill the requiremen… See more

The daguerreotype image is formed on a highly polished silver surface. Usually the silver is a thin layer on a copper substrate, but other metals such as brass can be used for the substrate and daguerreotypes can also be ma… See more

To optimize the image quality of the end product, the silver side of the plate had to be polished to as nearly perfect a mirror finish as possible. The silver had to be completely free of tarnish or other contaminati… See more