be made. Today's photography is based on the same principle as the Calotype. Talbot's photography was straight onto paper, and the imperfections of the paper were printed with the image when a positive was made. Several people experimented with glass instead of paper, but the problem was to make the silver solution stick to the shiny surface of the glass. In 1848 Abel Nipce de Saint-Victor, perfected a process of coating a glass plate with white of egg sensitised with potassium iodide, and washed with an acid solution of silver nitrate. This process, albumen, produced very fine detail and much higher quality. But it was very slow and only photos of architecture and landscapes could be taken, portraiture was simply not possible. In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer introduced the Wet Collodion process, which was much faster than the previous methods, reducing exposure times to two or three seconds. Which made photography much more versatile. Prices for daguerreotypes would cost about a guinea (1.05), which would be the weekly wage for many workers, but by using the collodion process, prints could be made for as little as one shilling (5p). With the collodion process the coating, exposure and development of the image had to be done whilst the plate was still wet, which required a considerable amount of equipment on location. There were various attempts to preserve exposed plates in wet collodion, to be developed later, but these preservatives lessened the sensitivity of the material.The next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard Leach Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin, a new discovery at the time, instead of glass for the photographic plate. This led to the development of the dry plate process, which could be developed much quicker than with any previous technique. Initially it was less sensitive, but was refined so that the idea of factory-made photographic material was now possible. The introduction of this dr...
