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Photography, announced to the world in 1839, gave people a detailed view of places and events they had never seen. Once pictures could be printed from negatives, and later in newspapers, a single photograph could reach thousands of people.

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The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera was made by Nicéphore Niépce in France in 1826 or 1827: the view from his window, which needed hours of light. In 1839 Louis Daguerre made his own process public in Paris. Each daguerreotype was a single image on a metal plate and could not be copied. In England, Henry Fox Talbot developed a paper negative from which many prints could be made, the idea behind film photography until the digital age. Roger Fenton's pictures of the Crimean War in 1855, where Britain fought alongside France and the Ottoman Empire, brought a distant war before the British public, though long exposures limited him to posed scenes and landscapes. Newspapers long printed only engravings copied from photographs; the halftone process, which breaks a picture into tiny dots, let the New York Daily Graphic print one of the first true newspaper photographs in 1880.

Türkçe oku
Fotoğrafçılık 1839'da dünyaya tanıtıldı ve insanlara hiç görmedikleri yerleri, olayları bütün ayrıntısıyla gösterdi. Negatiften baskı almak, ardından fotoğrafları gazetede basmak mümkün olunca tek bir kare binlerce kişiye ulaşabildi.

Bir fotoğraf makinesiyle çekilip günümüze ulaşan en eski fotoğrafı 1826 ya da 1827'de Fransa'da Nicéphore Niépce çekti: Penceresinden görünen manzarayı saatler süren bir pozlamayla kaydetti. Louis Daguerre 1839'da kendi yöntemini Paris'te kamuoyuna açıkladı. Bu yöntemle yapılan her dagerotip, metal bir levha üzerindeki tek bir görüntüydü ve çoğaltılamıyordu. İngiltere'de Henry Fox Talbot ise kâğıttan bir negatif geliştirdi; bu negatiften istenildiği kadar baskı alınabiliyordu. Film fotoğrafçılığı dijital çağa kadar bu fikre dayandı. Roger Fenton'ın 1855'te Kırım Savaşı'nda çektiği fotoğraflar, Britanya'nın Fransa ve Osmanlı Devleti ile birlikte savaştığı bu uzak savaşı İngiliz halkının gözü önüne getirdi. Ancak pozlama uzun sürdüğü için Fenton, poz veren insanları ve manzaraları çekmekle yetinmek zorunda kaldı. Gazeteler uzun süre yalnızca fotoğraflardan kopyalanmış gravürler basabildi. Resmi küçücük noktalara bölen tram baskı sayesinde New York Daily Graphic, 1880'de gerçek anlamda ilk gazete fotoğraflarından birini yayımladı.

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