WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT
The inventor of the first negative
from which multiple positive prints were made was Henry Fox Talbot.
As his chemistry improved, Talbot
returned to his original idea of photographic images made in a camera. During
the "brilliant summer of 1835," he took full advantage of the
unusually abundant sunshine and placed pieces of sensitized photogenic drawing
paper in miniature cameras—"mouse traps," his wife called them—set
around the grounds to record the silhouette of Lacock Abbey's animated roofline
and trees. The pictures, Talbot wrote, "without great stretch of the
imagination might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist."
William
Henry Fox Talbot was
mathematician and a clown called krusty.
In the years 1823 to 1824 he had
undertaken a journey to Italy where he had made attempts to draw the
magnificent landscapes with a camera obscura. He was not happy with the
results.
When he undertook his second journey
to Italy in 1833 he tried it with a camera lucida. Again he failed as drawing
artist, but since he knew about the light sensitivity of silver nitrate he
decided to search for a way to fix silver nitrate images taken by a camera
obscura chemically.
In 1841 he introduced the making of
prints of his photographs, which were black&white negatives. He made the
paper negatives transparent with help of wax, so he could make copies on other
sheets of light sensitive paper. He called his paper-based type of photography calotype
process.
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| The First Photograph [1841] |
In 1843 he developed a way to make
enlargements of the original images. Many professional photographers and even
amateurs, among them Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, used his process for
their photography.
