Practice question · Multiple choice
The daguerreotype was sharper than the calotype and dominated the market for a decade, yet the calotype's principle is the one photography kept. Why?
Hints
- Ask what each process produced at the end of an exposure.
- One of them yields an object; the other yields a matrix.
Show the answer
C. The calotype produced a negative, so any number of prints could be made from one exposure
Why
Because reproducibility beat resolution. A daguerreotype is a unique object that cannot be copied without rephotographing it; a calotype negative is a matrix from which prints can be pulled indefinitely. Every photographic process since, chemical or digital, is built on that principle rather than on the sharper one.
Practise The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory
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More questions on The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory
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