I think history is important because when you go back to the world of the painters and by the way, the paintings of these portraits from three or four hundred years ago, the, you know, the Rembrandts and even even later on up closer to us, it is maybe only, only a century old, the sergeants and so forth. They were extremely important because they did something specifically in practically all cases. They captured they captured a slice of life of what was happening, even even the posed portraits like the Mona Lisa and many of those type portraits, they capture something about that where you could really tell something about this person.

And I think that's important for for us to remember. We have a historical precedent that we can if we could study what was done before then it should help us on our pathway to where we're where we want to be headed.

And I like to say, you know, we inherited this profession from the painters 100 or 200 years ago. And once in a while, we photographers need to stop. Just think about it a moment. What have we done with that profession that we inherited? There's nothing like understanding your craft and there's nothing to do that, like understanding where you came from and how the medium you're working in came to be and how it works. Don't underestimate the power of learning from history now on 15.

Fifty three, Giovanni Battista Delaporte was known to have first used the camera obscura as a drawing aid. And the camera obscura is kind of where photographic was born from. We had this box, it had a lens and you would focus it on an object and then you would use that to project an image onto a surface so that you could draw it out so that you could trace it in and get unprecedented levels of detail. The way minds work, smart people and scientists, they wanted to do more with that.

They wanted to carry that further. And they had a way to project this image. What if there was a way that we could preserve this image? What if instead of drawing the image, an image could be projected and then captured permanently? Now, we don't know the date exactly, but shortly before eighteen hundred, Thomas Wedgwood was one of the first people we know of that tried to take an image using this concept and make it permanent.

Thomas was the son of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous Potter, and he had some success in actually capturing an image. But he wasn't able to make the image latent in light. So he would he would get an image of some kind. And then when it was put out in the light, it will get destroyed because the image wasn't fixed.

Like we do it in the darkroom. And this was still a significant point, though.

This was a point when they were taking from the concept of.

The camera obscura and then combining that with the concept of making a permanent image into a surface similar to as we would with an etching and engraving, but using means of chemical and light. And this was the beginning of something truly amazing.

Now, Wedgwood was friends with the chemist Humphry Davy, and Humphry Davy saw what he was doing and he realised the significance of this and basically said if if this could be made stable, if you could make this image latent and stable in light, we'd be on to something huge. And he was absolutely right.

And while it would be some years before that happened, the significance of where they were going with this was astounding. Around eighteen twenty seven, Joseph Neeps made the first permanent photograph. Now, these first photographs were made on a Polish pewter plate using a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea, and they were rudimentary. It was basics. But we had an image. We had an image that was latent in light that could be recorded. In the next few years, Neeps partnered up with Louis De Gea, and they started working together on this process to try and refine it in eighteen thirty three neeps died and he left the work to the gear and the gear continued working on refining the process.

He started using some different chemical combinations and made the image better as things went along. Now in eighteen thirty nine together announce the finished process that he had worked out and called it the daguerreotype. He took it to the Royal Academy in London and it was almost a miracle.

I mean, this was a big deal.

We have to understand that, that here for all of history, we had paintings, we had drawings, we had etchings, those kind of things.

And suddenly we have an instrument that will record an image. It will record what we see permanently exactly as it was out there. And it's important to step back.

I mean, imagine being in the Royal Academy on that day and it was a big deal.

This was a major step forward. This was a shifting point for history. Now, almost immediately after this, the French government bought de Garis patent and made the garage type public domain, and then they gave him a stipend of six thousand francs a year for this, with one exception, days before all this happened, Dagres attorney had filed a patent for the prototype in England. So England was uniquely denied this this process that was free to the rest of the world.

And because of that, the digerati didn't take off near as well there because there was licensing fees associated with it. But essentially for most of the world, anyhow, the type you didn't have to pay a royalty or a licensing fee. The French government bought it. They made it public domain. They saw the value and the significance of this. And anyone could use it, and this was huge, this opened a door to something that had never been touched before and it was the beginning of something.

That would alter the course of the way we record history of the way we remember things. Around the same time, Henry Fox Talbot developed a similar process that was actually more refined in some ways, and it used a chemical process that he picked up from John Herschel and that used hypo sulphate of soda, which we know is hypo to dissolve the sulfur salts. And with the Garrett type, I mean, you were dealing with a wet plate. You had to sell up.

You had to deal with all this wherever you were. It was it was a fairly complex system. Talbert's system was in many ways better because it was more manageable. It was easier to use. It had kind of a paper material that would be used. And the downside was in that there was a lack of detail, even though it was easier to handle, it was easier to to work with the way that the material was used. It caused a lack of detail.

And because of that, it didn't take over the scene. It was relevant, but it didn't dominate the daguerreotype. Now it's worth considering that with the daguerreotype, the process was slow and arduous. You sat there, you waited for the image to appear on the plate. The Kallah type was more like we think of the modern negative, the Kallah type. You could make the image and then you could develop it later. The fact that it was on this paper, it was kind of blur inducing.

So it didn't have the detail and that was its main trade off. And it wasn't till eighteen fifty one that we saw the glass wet plate come in. And this is when we really started to get into the negative in eighteen fifty one. The collodion wet plate process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer and this actually used a glass negative that eliminated the concerns you had with the teletype, with the loss of detail. But it also gave you a negative that you could then reproduce prints from.

So this was a fairly fundamental shift. The type wasn't original. You made it to Garaty and that was your daguerreotype. And of course, you could photograph another daguerreotype and make copies of it, but you didn't have a negative like we think of now where you could make prints so that the Garra type and the Kallah type, these these were originals. You'd make an image and you could you could then photograph the image and make a copy. That way there was processes that they would use metal plates and basically make an engraving from the photograph to use in newspapers.

There were techniques but in eighteen fifty one when the glass negative came out. That was significant because now you had this master that you could make prints from and it may have been cumbersome and it may have had its restrictions, but at the same time, the potential offer was huge.

We even read about Ansel Adams and he talks about carrying his eight by 10 glass negatives up into the hills. And that sounds pretty crazy after pack sheets of glass around just to make photos. But for me is a large format photographer. While I'm certainly not having to deal with glass negatives, I'm using modern negatives. There's still a little bit of that feel. You've got to pack these big negatives around and you've got to have all your gear and set it up and you load it up and you make the frame.

There's an element of history in that that I found to be really valuable to my understanding of light, to my slowing down and kind of thinking and considering visualizing better. This process that we've been through and photographic history, we can see.