BitRebels posted an article about the oldest photograph of a person the other day. The photo below shows a street corner in Paris in 1838 with nary a soul on it. It’s hard to believe that a street corner in a busy city like Paris could be so devoid of life. The one person in the photo is a person standing still to get his shoes shined.
Where are all the other people?
By 1800, Paris had over 500,000 people, so a third of a century later it surely had tens of thousands more. Why didn’t the camera capture any others?
This photograph of Boulevard du Temple in Paris was made in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, the brilliant guy that invented the daguerreotype process of photography. Aside from its distinction of being a super early photograph, it’s also the first photograph to ever include a human being. Because the image required an exposure time of over ten minutes, all the people, carriages, and other moving things disappear from the scene. However, in the bottom left hand corner is a man who just so happened to stay somewhat still during the shot — he was having his shoes shined. (PetaPixel)
Early cameras were more or less Pinhole Cameras. Meaning they took in only as much light as could get through a hole made by a pin. So they took 10 minutes to capture an image and you had to hold very still to be in one. If you were moving or walking past, you disappeared…
Pinhole Camera
You can approximate the image above by making a pinhole camera. It’s really easy to both make and use. It’s pretty much just a cardboard box the size of a piece of film with a tiny hole in one end. You can download the instructions from Instructables.com or buy a Pinhole Camera Kit
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