How did people take pictures before the handheld camera & roll film?

How did society take pictures before the development of george eastman's (kodak!) roll of film and hand held camera?





how did people take picture before his invention since he invented the compact film camera?|||Prior to the invention of roll film and the box camera(the brownie) photography was primarily in the hands of professionals. As you probably read, with glass plate collodion, a sticky photosensitive emulsion is poured onto a smoothe sheet of glass then while still moist is exposed and developed on site. The photographer actually had to have a portable darkroom to practice their trade.


Prior to the invention of glass collodion the most popular photographic process was the Dagguereotype process yet another lovely, yet dangerous photographic process. Lovely because the photographic substrate was a piece of highly polished silver, dangerous for the fact that mercury was an integral requirement for the development of a plate (the bequerrel process made dags a bit more safe though). However Glass collodion and Dagguereotypes weren't the only types of processes that were used in the 19th century. Tintypes were also quite popular but not unlike the chemistry found on wetplate collodion. Below I included a website of other processes that were available to many photographers prior to the invention of the brownie and roll film http://www.alternativephotography.com/pr鈥?/a>


However, you should note that some of the processes may have been developed after the fact so you should read the footnotes for each process.


So in terms of cameras, photographers were using view cameras, not unlike the modern view cameras which are used today in a lot of commercial photography and amongst young photographers interested in tilt shift photography. More or less they look like accordians with lens attached to it. Anyhow I hope this info helps you out|||Old pictures were taken with a flash and some sort of plate and developed from there. Everyone had to hold real still thats why alot of old pictures people didn't smile in them