Smaller Box, Brighter Image

One of photography's pioneers, an English country squire turned scientist named William Henry Fox Talbot, took a different route from that of Petzval to speed up picture taking. At first Talbot, like his contemporary Daguerre, had used a large camera obscura. But he found that an exposure of even one full hour in full sunlight often failed to get a picture. Then Talbot realized that tiny cameras, using lenses of short focal lengths, would be much faster. The light gathered would be concentrated on a small area rather than dispersed over a large one; the brighter image thus cast would be recorded faster by the weak photographic materials he was forced to use.

Talbot fitted microscope lenses-the most carefully made lenses produced up to that time-to the little cameras, which his wife dubbed "mousetraps." The cameras were very small indeed, as the photograph above indicates,

some of them measuring only 2,5 inches on a side. With one of these cameras, Talbot made his first successful photo­graph, a picture of a window in his manor house. The exposure time had been cut to a half hour, but the picture was so small-one inch square-that he dismissed it as looking like the work "of some Lilliputian artist." Lacking any means of enlarging his pictures, Talbot abandoned his mousetraps and concentrated his efforts on develop­ing photographic materials sensitive enough to work in larger, conventional cameras.

But the mousetraps he discarded were to become, nearly a century later and in a much more sophisticated form, the cameras most people used. For Tal­bot had the right idea: The key to speed in picture taking was a small camera whose short-focal-Iength lens made the most of dim light by concentrating it on a small piece of film. 

In this early photograph, taken in two parts and pieced together, Talbot and his assistants put on a busy show. Talbot himself prepares a camera to take a portrait of a waiting customer (the ring behind the sitter will serve to keep his head steady during the exposure). At left, an assistant copies a painting; at right, another photographs a statue. In the background a technician puts negatives on racks in the sun to make positive prints. At far right, the kneeling man holds a target for the taker of this photograph to focus on.