movement / dry plate

Photography of movement

A few years before the introduction of the dry plate, the world was amazed by the photographs of horses taken by Eadweard Muybridge in California.

To take these photographs, Muybridge used a series of 12 to 24 cameras arranged side by side opposite a reflecting screen.

The shutters of the cameras were released by the breaking of their attached threads as the horse dashed by. Through this technique, Muybridge secured sets of sequential photographs of successive phases of the walk, the trot, and the gallop.

When the pictures were published internationally in the popular and scientific press, they demonstrated that the positions of the animal’s legs differed from those in traditional hand-drawn representations.

To prove that his photographs were accurate, Muybridge projected them upon a screen one after the other with a lantern-slide projector he had built for the purpose; the result was the world’s first motion-picture presentation. This memorable event took place at the San Francisco Art Association in 1880.



Muybridge, whose early studies were made with wet plates, continued his motion studies for some 20 years. With the new gelatin plates, he was able to improve his technique greatly, and in 1884–85, at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania, he produced 781 sequential photographs of many kinds of animals as well as men and women engaged in a wide variety of activities.

He was aided in this project by painter Thomas Eakins, who many regard as the most outstanding American painter of the 19th century. Though few painters took it seriously, Eakins believed the new photographic technology was a tool to better represent the physical world. Throughout much of the 1880s, Eakins brought these interests to students at the Pennsylvania Academy, encouraging them to study anatomy and work from live nude models. In 1886 his insistence on the use of nude models saw a great deal of criticism. Frustrated with the criticism, he eventually resigned.

Muybridge’s photographic analysis of movement coincided with studies by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to develop chronophotography. (the study of images depicting movement for art purposes) Étienne-Jules Marey was fascinated with flight and with animals and insects that could fly. In 1882, Marey created his photographic gun. It was an instrument capable of taking 12 consecutive frames per second at the pull of the trigger. Poetically it was beautiful because rather than terminating the object at which it points, Marey’s photographic gun would instead capture it forever.

Whereas Muybridge had employed a battery of cameras to record detailed, separate images of successive stages of movement, Marey and Eakins both used only one, recording an entire sequence of movement on a single plate. With Marey’s method, the images of various phases of motion sometimes overlapped, but it was easier to see and understand the flow of movement.

Marey and Eakins were also able to record higher speeds at shorter intervals than Muybridge. Both his and Muybridge’s work greatly contributed to the field of motion study and to the development of the motion picture.

Marey also invented a slow motion camera in 1894, which took pictures at the rate of 700 per second!

Development of the dry plate

In the 1870s many attempts were made to find a dry substitute for wet collodion so that plates could be prepared in advance and developed long after exposure, which would thereby eliminate the need for a portable darkroom. In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, suggested suspending silver bromide in a gelatin emulsion, an idea that led, in 1878, to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatin containing silver salts. This event marked the beginning of the modern era of photography.

Gelatin plates were about 60 times more sensitive than collodion plates. The increased speed freed the camera from the tripod, and a great variety of small hand-held cameras became available at relatively low cost, allowing photographers to take instantaneous snapshots.

Wet plates were already down to 1 - 3 seconds, so now exposures could be fractions of seconds.

Of these, the most popular was the Kodak camera, introduced by George Eastman in 1888. Its simplicity greatly accelerated the growth of amateur photography, especially among women, to whom much of the Kodak advertising was addressed.

In place of glass plates, the camera contained a roll of flexible negative material sufficient for taking 100 circular pictures, each roughly 2.5 inches (6 cm) in diameter. After the last negative was exposed, the entire camera was sent to one of the Eastman factories (Rochester, New York, or Harrow, Middlesex, England), where the roll was processed and printed; They would shit it back to you with prints and a new roll of film already in the camera.

“You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” was Eastman’s description of the Kodak system.

At first Eastman’s so-called “American film” was used in the camera; this film was paper based, and the gelatin layer containing the image was stripped away after development and fixing and transferred to a transparent support.

In 1889 this was replaced by film on a transparent plastic base of nitrocellulose that had been invented in 1887 by the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, New Jersey.

Goodwin was looking for new ways of showing religious imagery and had done a lecture about his new invention. Eastman was in the audience during the lecture and while Goodwin filed for the patent, he actually died in a street accident before the patent went through. Eastman essentially stole his idea but then Ansco who had bought the patent rights from Goodwin sued Kodak for 5 million dollars.

3 reasons for the name Kodak:
1) it should be short
2) one cannot mispronounce it
3) and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak

Some old advertisements for Kodaks and other products.