Hippolyte Bayard

Hippolyte Bayard (20 January 1807 – 14 May 1887) was one of the earliest photographers in the history of photography, inventing his own photography process known as direct positive printing and presenting the world's first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839.
The direct positive process involved exposing silver chloride paper to light, which turned the paper completely black. It was then soaked in potassium iodide before being exposed in a camera. After the exposure, it was washed in a bath of hyposulfite of soda and dried. The resulting image was a unique photograph that could not be reproduced. Due to the paper's poor light sensitivity, an exposure of approximately twelve minutes was required. Using this method of photography, still subject matter, such as buildings, were favored. When used for photographing people, sitters were told to close their eyes so as to eliminate the eerie, "dead" quality produced due to blinking and moving one's eyes during such a long exposure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard 8/31/10

William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor, born on February 11, 1800 and died on September 17, 1877. He was the inventor of calotype process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. Additionally, he made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, and York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Fox_Talbot 8/30/10

Louis Jacques Mande Daquerre

Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France. He apprenticed in architecture, theater design, and panoramic painting. Exceedingly adept at his skill for theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theater and later came to invent the Diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.
Louis Daguerre regularly used a camera obscura as an aid to painting in perspective, and this led him think about ways to keep the image still. In 1826, he discovered the work of Joseph Niepce, and in 1829 began a partnership with him.
http://inventors.about.com/od/dstartinventions/a/Daguerreotype.htm 8/26/10

Lubitel 166+ camera

This camera was made in 1932 till present. It’s something about that plastic body. Something about peering down through that waist-level finder. Sizing up your subject with the top lens and capturing it through crispy glass lens with the bottom. It’s simply irresistible to people who love and adore life. People who are open-minded, enthusiastic, free with their ideas, philanthropic, endlessly curious, always travelling, constantly documenting, and completely awestruck by the enduring power of analog photographs. In other words – people like you!

Henri Le Secq

Henri Le Secq, a painter and antiquarian, collected Old Masterprints and medieval ironwork. As the son of a politician, Le Secq became an expert on his native Paris and the self-appointed guardian of its historic architectural treasures as the city faced urbanization. Unsurprisingly, his photographs of the city's architecture are the work for which he is best known. In 1851 he became a founder of the Société héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world.
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1774 25/8/10

Joseph Niepce

Born on 7 March 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, Niépce was a French inventor, known as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in the field. Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, by the age of thirty, had been a professor at an Oratorian college, a staff officer in the French army, and the Administrator of the district of Nice, France.
The history of photography dates back to the first-ever fixed picture taken by Joseph Niépce on a hot summer day in 1825.
http://www.fotoflock.com/index.php/learn-photography/history-of-photography/54-history/2102-joseph-niepce 25/8/10