During the trip to the Brooklyn Historical Society, I learned about the daguerreotype and how it completely changed the experience of both taking and viewing photographs. It wasn’t so long ago that people had to commission a painting to have a portrait of themselves. So, once the daguerreotype was invented, it brought that luxury to everyone.
After taking in all that information, I was able to handle a daguerreotype for the very first time. I was surprised to learn about how different/difficult it was to take a daguerreotype versus the digital photograph of today; One of them being the exposure time. Today we take advantage of how fast we are able to take photographs, but the daguerreotype had an exposure time of 20 seconds – It was impossible for any type of photojournalism to exist with that time frame. The daguerreotype was printed on a silver plated sheet of copper that cannot be expanded, whereas my own digital photos could be expanded as large as its pixels allow. Today, I could take as many photos as I like, unlike the daguerreotype, where you are just limited to one copy. The photos that I’ve taken this semester have all been much simpler to take compared to the complexities of the daguerreotype.
