Assignment 1 Part 1 Web 2.0 Journal Blog
Topic 1: The role of portraits in the early days of photography and portraits today.
1. What are main differences and similarities between portraits in the early days of photography and portraits today?
Photography and portraits in the early days were available only to people with a lot of money, had some status, or both. Back in the early days a photograph was expensive mainly due to the new technology being developed at the time. As time passed more photographers started to appear and photography was also made available to the people that wanted to become photographers that were middle class. The photographs and portraits in the early days were mostly always done in a studio. At the present time with the technological advancements we have made since the early days photographs can be taken anywhere. In the early days it would take hours to set up everything for taking one self-portrait photograph of somebody. In the present it would only take a very short time to do the same thing due to the new technological advancements we have made with cameras.
2. Who was the photographer and who was the subject of photographs in the past and today?
In the past photographers were people that spent most to all of their time doing photography every week. The reason the photographers did this is the cameras were very hard to use so the photographers using these cameras had to know and understand every part of the camera to use it properly when taking photographs. In the past developing a photograph was very difficult and took a lot of time making the photographer have patience while developing any photograph. Photography was not a career that provided stable income for the photographers because they were not famous. In today's society anybody that owns a camera can be a photographer. In the past it required a lot of training to be a photographer, but in the present it still requires training but not as much as it did in the past.
3. What was the impact on technology on the portraits in the past and today?
Technologies impact on portraits in the past allowed portraits to appear in a photograph of black and white due to colored photographs not being invented yet. In the present we have new technology that we have made with our cameras that now allow us to take colored photographs instead of the old black and white ones that were used in the past.
This is an example of a self-portrait in black and white.
This is a self-potrait in color.
As you can tell from looking at both of the photographs that the technological advances that have been made since the 1830's has been huge for the photography and art. There were Daguerreotype photographs that were revolutionary for 20 years. Photography has advanced far since the Daguerreotype photographs and we are still advancing our technological advances today. From a self-portrait in black and white to the now colored photographs. The world of photography seems bright for the present and future photographers and it is all thanks to the first photographers like Louis Jacques Mande Daguerreo, and Henry Talbot that started photography and we are still using it today.
In 1839, French photographer Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre showed the world the first photographs and they were very detailed and at the time was a "one of a kind" photograph. A Daguerrerotype is a photographic image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized with salt water.
(Daguerre, Para 4) Daguerre later named his invention the Daguerreotype and told other people how to make the photographs. Most of the Daguerreotype photos were burned when Daguerreo's laboratory burned to the ground later in 1939 leaving very few copies of the daguerreotype photographs. (Daguerreo, Para 6)
This is a Daguerreotype photograph.
References:
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lk8vhptHkx1qcl8ymo1_500.jpg
http://ih3.redbubble.net/work.2508017.2.flat,550x550,075,f.self-portrait-color-version.
http://www.wired.com/ly/wired/news/images/full/Daguerreotype_Daguerre_Atelier_1837.jpg
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/French_Daguerreotypes/dawn_more.htm
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