Introduction to the History of Photography

A Manchu bride, Beijing - ca 1871      The Island Pagoda , Min River , Fukien, circa 1871. Street Gamblers , circa 1868 - 1871. Modern albumen print from wet-collodion negative   Through China with a Camera by John Thomson (1899) http://www.archive.org/details/throughchinawit04thomgoog John Thomson,   Honan Soldiers , 1871 (self portrait with Honan Soldiers) . Albumen stereograph from wet-collodion negative. Taken in Amoy in 1871, one of the few images of Thomson in the Far East, also considered one of the few self-portraits of the photographer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomson,_Honan_Soldiers.jpg links: The photographs of John Thomson - National Library of Scotland John Thomson at the Victoria & Albert Museum

  Gustave Le Gray Self portrait, c. 1852 "Though he was trained as a painter, Gustave Le Gray made his mark in the emerging medium of photography. An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a waxed-paper negative that produced sharper-focus prints. In 1851 he began to use collodion on glass negatives, which further increased the clarity of his images. He became one of the first five photographers, along with Édouard-Denis Baldus and Hippolyte Bayard, to work for the missions héliographiques, a government-sponsored commission to document the state of repair of important French monuments and buildings. Le Gray is credited with teaching photography to many important French photographers in the 1850s. In 1851 he became a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world, and later joined the Société Française de Photographie. In 1860 Le Gray started to tour the Med...

  more at: http://www.youtube.com/user/quinnjacobson