The role of portraits in the early days of photography and portraits today

Some of the similarities between photography today and in the early stages of its birth are that portraits are mostly taken of still people, landscape, food and environment. In history, only the wealthy such as royalties and owners of large companies could afford to have portraits taken. Daguerreotype and Calotype were used in the 1850's in France.

This Daguerreotype process was discovered by two inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in France and William Fox Talbot in England.It was a very detailed and clear image preserved on a copper plate and you could only have one copy of your photo.

Calotype is a negative image on paper,it coated a sheet of drawing paper with the chemical compound silver chloride and put it in a camera obscura. Paper got exposed by letting light hit it and produced an image of the scene with the tones reversed . Colours would vary, but they were mostly brown sometimes reddish or purplish with white, you could have several copies of your photo. These both methods employed large amounts of chemicals and salt water, plus hours for developing a photo. 

Currently, there is a multitude of technological advancements such as digital cameras, editing software, lighting equipment etc. For example, we have digital cameras now, we can take as many as we wish, delete them, take some more. Check if someone has red-eyes or picture is buried, people can  take more pictures until everything is perfect. Every single color that our eyes are able to see, the camera is also able to capture.

In the early days, only the rich people could afford photographs. The photographers were hired by them  and to take portraits of them. The photographer was like an artist or a painter, since cameras were difficult to operate, photographers at that time were people with high degree chemistry knowledge. Nowadays, anyone  can take a picture, whoever has a camera can take a great picture once in a while. So any of us can be a photographer since cameras are much cheaper now and very easy to use.

The impact on technology was huge compare to the past 200 years. Pictures were not so clear, they were more cloudy and distorted. Then there was the issue of no color. For a long time only black and white pictures were available. 

And right now we have the digital cameras. We can take pictures of everything we want and upload them on the internet, we can crop the picture; edit it, photoshop it . In today’s world photos are almost perfect, They can be manipulated to make them better by changing backgrounds, editing errors such as ‘red eyes‘, adding the smallest of details such as eye shadow or fake nails. The possibilities are endless.