Photography development question

[DarkArk]

So, I've done some research into the subject and it seems to me that there isn't anything stopping the development of photography in a medieval style setting. You would need the proper chemicals, and quality lens production, and it seems to me that that's it as far as technological advancement. Is there something about chemistry, metallurgy or machined tools that I am missing?

Adding on to this, is it then possible to develop color photography in the same way that is shown in the following link? There doesn't appear to be anything stopping the development of photography production in such a manner, besides the actual discovering of the process.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/0 ... y_ago.html

I'm thinking about this for a book idea I had, and there doesn't seem to be anything about photographic technology that would require it to be a product of the industrial era. Of course it would remain a toy of the rich and powerful.

[spooky spice]

erm, I'm going to say paper quality (dredging memories of being shown how to develop B&W photos)

[Mayabird]

I was debating whether to leave it in Fantasy, send to History, or send to SLAM. It isn't the best fit in the first (and won't get as much viewing, which I'd rather have since it seems like a good question to me), Thanas would probably oppress me for daring sully the second, so I'm trying the third. Feel free to move the thread elsewhere if it fits more.

[madd0ct0r]

lenses would be the killer I think.
that and silver nitrate would be very expensive to make.

there was a few Renaissance painters who used (or are assumed to have used) a proto-type camera.

It's possible if you had a Leonardo Da Vinci type messing around he may have come across the idea.

[Broomstick]

You do not need a lens to make a working camera, see camera obscura, which is what some people claim was used by Renaissance artists such as da Vinci. It may have been known in Byzantium as early as the 6th Century. The main problem with such claims is the lack of hard evidence, but there are written descriptions of things that might very well have been such cameras. Some of the early daguerrotype and related photographs were made with these.

One does not have to use the modern photochemicals, either. In the early 19th Century Niépce in France used asphalt, copper planting, and lavender oil to make some of the earliest true photographs, although the exposures took hours.

Daguerrotypes use silver iodide, not silver nitrate. I believe you can also use silver bromide and silver chloride, but it's been a long time since my college history of photography class and I seem to have misplaced my class notes over the past few decades. Whether that would be more expensive or not depends on supplies of individual elements and chemicals. There is the distinct drawback, however, that daguerrotypes use mercury vapor to develop the image, and that vapor is incredibly toxic. I recall hearing somewhere that in the 19th Century the average daguerrotypist had a lifespan of about two years.

Cyanotypes or "blueprints" can be made with ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide - the latter being a potential safety hazard as mishandling can generate hydrogen cyanide, but it's not rocket science. I managed to use it to make cyanotypes without killing myself. It doesn't require paper, just something that will soak up the photosolution (cloth was popular back when I was playing around with it). After that, all you need is UV light - sunlight works quite well - and running water to develop/fix the image. The question is then how easy would it be for medieval level people to make ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide?

Those are just the ones off the top of my head - there are quite likely other photographic processes out there I'm not aware of.

[someone_else]

lenses would be the killer I think.
that and silver nitrate would be very expensive to make.

dunno, but eyeglasses and magnification devices in general are pretty old inventions

[PeZook]

Photography really came together when chemistry developed enough to allow cheap and relatively safe production of the necessary chemicals. Lenses are not really all that necessary, though of course getting a good lens in medieval times was uh slightly difficult, much less an entire system of them.

So, what Broomstick said

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Photography really came together when chemistry developed enough to allow cheap and relatively safe production of the necessary chemicals. Lenses are not really all that necessary, though of course getting a good lens in medieval times was uh slightly difficult, much less an entire system of them.

So, what Broomstick said :)

Lenses were known to antiquity. The Greeks had lenses for burning things and erasing wax tablets, and medieval monks had so-called 'reading stones.' You don't need a whole system of lenses . . . just one would do. Of course, a single lens of short focal length will be plagued by number of problems . . . chromatic aberration and spherical aberration being the top two. Though, with the insensitivity of the sorts of chemicals readily available to would-be medieval photographers, the long exposure times and poor developed images would tend to mask the crappy quality of the optical system.

[PeZook]

Lenses were known to antiquity. The Greeks had lenses for burning things and erasing wax tablets, and medieval monks had so-called 'reading stones.' You don't need a whole system of lenses . . . just one would do. Of course, a single lens of short focal length will be plagued by number of problems . . . chromatic aberration and spherical aberration being the top two. Though, with the insensitivity of the sorts of chemicals readily available to would-be medieval photographers, the long exposure times and poor developed images would tend to mask the crappy quality of the optical system.

The OP asked about photography developing, though. Yeah, you could probably build a camera of sorts, but I assume development is more than just constructing a one-off device.

[DarkArk]

Thanks for the responses so far.

It seems that while it wouldn't be technically impossible there are many things about a medieval society that would make it problematic. In a lot of ways lack of precise and accurate measuring tools would be one of the biggest hurdles to making a functioning camera, since it informs knowledge of so much else. It seems to me that some alchemist playing around might figure out the necessary compounds, but they would have no easy way of producing them in quantity.

A one off device was not my original idea, but making photography relatively commonplace. Primitive photography might well have developed, but not the way I had originally envisioned.