The History and Practice Of The Art Of Photography

The book I read to research this post was The History and Practice of The Art Of Photography by Henry Hunt Snelling which is a very good book that I downloaded for nothing from kindle. This book was published in 1849 and is a history of what was then a recent discovery invented in 1827 by Niepce. It was a British invention like a lot of things in that era. I think this book is quite a classic probable a bit less applicable to our world of technology but never the less interesting. It was known to the early alchemists that light reacted with silver compounds that made it go lighter or darker which is what photography is based on. In this book he uses things like bromide paper and silver chloride with the basic principles being that forms of bleach are added that only react with the silver compound when light is present making it lighter in those areas. Initially photography was thought to be useful for photographing the sun. Later Samuel Morse the inventor of morse code saw an application in doing portraits. Of dark places at this time photography was still useless and people like historians sometimes still had to draw things like antiquities in dark places. This book is 78 pages and there is information on the old methods of developing and taking photos. I think there is still something called a Camera Obscura in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth which is quite a tourist attraction and is a room that is also a giant pinhole camera. People go into the room and can see an inverted scenic view of outside projected on a wall. It is made dark and light comes through a small hole achieving this effect. I very much enjoyed reading this book and would definitely recommend it.