The Daguerreotype

His name was Louis Daguerre and he was a little full of himself. He was working against time, and plenty of other competitors to develope a good modification of the heliograpgh. He had help from mr. heliograph himself Joseph Niepce, and with the two together came the first "camera". The fun thing is that this new machine, although still a bunch bigger than our cameras today, used the combined process of the camera obscura and the chemical logics of the heliograph. It was wonderful and he got paid big francs for it. Here are some examples, as the Daguerreotype was a common source of photographs for years.

Heliograph- dun dun dunnnnn

There once was a man from france, with paper and light he did prance, to capture the first scape of land, only to destroy it by his own hand. real talk.

Joseph Niepce produced the first known "photograph". He called his method of capturing his images Heliographs, which litereally means Sun Writing. This guy worked from 1793 (when he successfully mixed Bitume with a chemical popular in use of varnish for his time, and did produce an image, but that image would decompose almost immediately) up until 1825 when he had perfected the art of preserving the heliographs he produced.

See, the unfortunate thing about "The very first photo ever created" is that it was also the very first photo ever destroyed. Joseph Niepce had a successful photo before the release of View from the Window at Le Gras, but as brilliant as he was, his common sense got the best of him and instead of waiting to experiment in manipulation with later photograpghs, he used his very first. But we do still have the runner up! Ah the one that survived. And here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for, the first photograph that ever survived, View from the Window at Le Gras.

we also learned about this is photography class. I'm just lending you a crash course yo.

A step away from painting

One of the first things we learned in photography class is: The Camera Obscura (enter creepy voice of Vincent Price).

So basically what the camera obscura means is that someone has a canvas in a completely dark room. I'm talkin- a room that is sealed all, no hole, no cracks, no crannies (whatever a cranny is?). And with this dark room, the artist figures out where to pop a tiny hole in a wall. This tiny hole only lets enough light in to the complete black room that the actual image of the outside is projected onto the canvas. How cool is that? Here's a picture explaining.

So it was a cheaters way of painting, or alot of smart men that made alot of easy money.