Fox Talbot and camera in 1864 portrait (on the PetaPixel website).
Toronto. The title is a riff on the old saying, “… build a better mousetrap …“. One of the earliest cameras was called a mousetrap by the spouse of its creator. It was basically a very small camera obscura. A light tight wooden box held a piece of salted paper at one end and a short focal length lens at the other.
Next to the lens was a small corked hole. The cork was removed briefly to check the progress of the exposure (a latent image was not used – the salted paper was like the printing out paper of a later age).
The resulting exposure was inverted – light areas were dark and vice versa.We would later recognize this as a negative. By placing a second sheet of salted paper under the ‘negative’ and exposing the sandwich to sunshine, a ‘positive’ print was created.
All this was part of William Henry Fox Talbot‘s experiments shortly before Daguerre’s iconic announcement. Talbot had succeeded in ‘fixing’ the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ salted papers by using a diluted solution of salt.
We have come a long way since the late 1830s in film based photography: more sensitivity, better resolution, latent images, greater flexibility – and better cameras!
PS. Checkout our website (use the search box in the upper right side) to see more about Talbot.
