Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 33 PREVIEW: Photography

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

is your wife interested in photographs wink wink nudge nudge full episode on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/85393854

Yeah, it's yeah, but I mean we're stepping up majorly if you go to the next slide. Oh, yeah This this baby. This is a daguerreotype. It's the earliest surviving daguerreotype taken by mr. Deguerre himself Seen here. He's 37 Seen her first guy ever to take a to invent a way of taking a photo of himself. I think it's nice If you look up images this this guy, he looks permanently confused in so many of his pictures. And there's like, you have to pose for so long. So there's no way that wasn't just on purpose.

He was like, I want to look like I'm always lost in thought and a little worried about it. This big, aw, interesting expression. Yeah. He's still like, oh, no one had figured out how you were supposed to pose for photos yet. So of course, he was confused. I'd be confused.

Till if I if I invented a new kind of camera, no, no, no, no, to say cheese. You gotta learn to say cheese, man. Yeah. What? What's the one invented saying cheese? Oh, did I? One thing I will say, those we have a very early camera on the bottom right. And we do same, same principle as a camera obscura right except we've

Advanced optics to the point that instead of just having a hole which kind of sucks for any number of reasons not least You don't get a very clear image, but you get as a lens you know lens assembly You put that on the front and you can like magnify it and you can enhance the image that goes onto the like the photographic medium at the front and you can magnify it and you can enhance the image that goes onto the photographic medium at the back and you fuck around with that and you tank with the chemistry and that to the gyro type. That's a fucking gyro type. Gyro type.

Gyro type. This is when they'd figure that out. Bitch, you know, Judea, okay, it's light sensitive, light sensitive you know fair enough but you're not going to get a good photo of it this this is using fucking silver and we're going to be using silver photo he's sitting up until the morning to sort my beloved silver salt oh silver iodide makes my fucking life like it's the a silver nitrate girl myself. Ah, that's not fair to sense that, but that's not fair to me. Is it not?

What the fuck? No, no. Well, it's okay, it's... No, it's not. It's one of the least, but it's the cheapest way of getting a sort of... silver, which is why it's like the major. It's the go-to-it. What a fucking ice cream drop. It's too hot.

Wow, this could stop the is out in this. I mean, my cat, that guy doesn't stop for anything. Grind the devil stops. He was out like in the middle of the George Floyd riot. Yeah, he was. He's got to sell ice creams to angry people. Yeah, so, okay, listen, I may not know the difference between myself and nitrates and myself Riodides, but if you want a chemistry lesson fuck off to technology connections, right?

Do you hear for gonna get a chemistry lesson later on from me? You only for whatever it is that we bring to this Yes, I invited an ex chemistry teacher on the fucking bike. I was just to talk about a chemistry that I love. I mostly just wanted to tell people to fuck off to technology connections. It's really good. It's a really good channel as the problem.

Yeah. So you think as of this, when this technique was revealed at the Academy of Science and Art, which it's written in French in real life, in 1830 fucking nine, Paris, understandably, in 1830 fucking nine. Paris, understandably, went fucking mental for it, because all of a sudden, you could create a fucking image, and this is just like nothing anyone had ever done before,

other than like bitch, you min of duty, and nobody cares about fucking any of that shit. This, this was so impressive, they referred to it as the mirror of nature, right? Because the de Gerotype is a very shiny. It's only 11 years later later too, that's insane. It moves so quickly, like early photography was just guys having breakthroughs every like 20 minutes.

It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, everyone of the non-one of this shit, but exposure time, it's down from eight hours, fair. But it's still about 15 minutes, which is short but very long. It's very long if you have to sit still for 15 minutes, but it's short if you realize that now you can get a fucking photograph of yourself taken in 15 minutes. Good for landscapes, great for portraiture. Great for landscapes.

But for like action photography, not really possible. Yeah, that's so good. Yeah, nope. You're not going up in like Times Square and getting any street shots with a de-garage. You are, but they're going to like real fucked up. I can show you what they look like. You would get a long exposure.

Yeah, actually, it's 1837. There's no action happening. It's just I'll just like a horse and card plotting slowly down the street. Not a horse made. A heart risk. It's like action happening. It's just all just like a horse some card plotting slowly down the story. Not a horse made cart racing like that's actually to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You see what's actually it's just the kind of action that's criminal. You'll next slide. Next slide. Maybe you'll see a train. Maybe there's like two of them. So this is an this is action photography. This is an action to garotype. This is a genuine world historical moment. This is the first photograph of a person.

If you know they're bottom left. Yeah, bottom left. That is a dude getting a shoe shined. This is Boulevard du Tonne, in Paris, third or wrong, this more. They literally go, sticks the camera out the window in 1838. And the exposure time for this this 10 minutes, right? In those 10 minutes lots of people lots of cards go up and down the boulevard

Like and those do not appear at best you get like a faint sort of like shadow But one dude happens to be standing still with his leg up for 10 minutes getting his shoes really fucking shined I guess. And that's the like earliest photographic memory we have of our person. Like crazy. The chemistry, like, the technology coexist at this specific moment in time,

someone who never knew about it most likely was like immortalized chemically. And it's just like, it's so strange and surreal. you about it most likely was immortalized chemically. And it's just like, it's so strange and surreal. And it's such a sort of like a historical moment. And so many early photographs are like this, where you see sort of like glimpses of people's faces who stood still for like maybe five minutes at a time.

And so, you know, their body has gone and their face is still there. Or like people sort of like linger at doorways and then disappear and everything sort of like appears through a bit of a fog. And then you realize that, you know, that's people, that's the movement of people, none of whom have been successfully recorded,

but like a couple have. And it's really, really compelling to me that it's like sort of accidents like this, little like sort of things of chance in fact that like determine what might be the like the only visual historical record for any of these people. And that's something I feel very strongly about photography is that like most people there was no visual record of their existence. In any way, prior to the existence of photography, you weren't paying to have a portrait done. You, you, no one knew what you looked like. You might have a little cameo, maybe that would be lost immediately or smashed or whatever.

Uh, uh, that like, for almost, and if someone's doing a portrait of you as well, like if you're rich and you purchase like a portrait of yourself They're gonna hedge you a little bit. Yeah, of course. Even that's not gonna be a true representation of what you look like in that moment Not like fucking camera can produce. Oh, thank God it's not raining. You can You can really understand why there were so many breakthroughs in the early years. Well, it's good luck out there else I know I'm gonna go out there naked and just like stand under it for a bit. I'll be right back. Ha ha ha.

It's been like two weeks and like 20, 27 to 29 degrees and like a hundred. It's been crazy. I really need it. I've been walking around saying they should, they should let you know if like, it's the last time you're ever gonna feel rain. As I was raining a couple of weeks ago

and it, it wasn't bookended at all, it just stopped, and then it hasn't started again for fucking weeks. And I'm like, so what should it told me that that's the last rain I was gonna get? Oh no, it's really coming up. We wouldn't have had it ceremony about it. Ideal, can we have podcasts outside? I'll put up like a, like a,

next slide please. Just give podcasts inside. And we have to go to the next slide. That's what we do. I put in a bunch of cartoons about photographers as they became a social phenomenon. And my favorite of these is the largest, which is the guy, the Western photographer who just pulls a gun on you.

And is like, if you move, I'll kill you. Any photographer shooting along exposure. That's where the phrase shooting came to that's right. Yeah, you know, represent photography. Yeah. This so again, breakthroughs are coming thick and fast. So by 1842, new lenses, pure chemicals like better, better suited chemicals for the purposes have brought exposure dimes down to like about a minute. Which is like fucking sick. One minute. It's nothing. There are the Gerritide portraits, studios are popping up all over in all three cities of the

world, which were London, Paris and New York at this time. That's all the ones. That's all of them. What's crazy is how accessible this is immediately. Like by the 18, like 1850s, 1860s, you could like take your kid or your family in and get like a family portrait, like the one that Punch is making fun of here. And like you could get a like a recognizable visual representation of what you fucking look like for not that much money. Like it was it was a lucrative business but it was like accessible to the middle classes and honestly kind of trickle down by the 1880s

to like even where sort of like the upwardly mobile working classes could afford to have photographs taken of themselves Still very posed mind you as you get hints of with this where it's like you know The photographer will set you up in front of a backdrop with some props much like a portrait painter would Where like for instance if you're a woman getting married you you you you might get given a Bible to have on your lap or something. But as an established convention of portraiture, but even so, it takes a fucking minute, that's nothing. I just, however, calling it accessible is some. Accessible to consumers.

Accessible to keyboards. Accessible to consumers. If we go to the next slide here, what I've done is I've, I'm going to take you through how to take a to get a type. So number one here is this bloke. This guy is buffing a silver plated like plate of copper. So a already someone's had to do some fucking electrolysis. Again, this here. So, we've played a play of copper off to an absolute mirror. You want this to be as shiny as possible. Then, number two, you put it into an airtight box and fume it with iodine and bromine. Safe. Oh, bromine. Fun. Yeah. Real safe. You want those fumes just in. Yeah, real safe. You want those fumes just in yeah Yeah, you want to be in a good way to put our orange color just Mm-hmm drifting into the room

Now what's happening here is that the the iodine the bromine are reacting with the silver to create photosynthesis of salts Silver iodide silver bromide That's a really change You would expose it in your camera. You can see that there's a guy here with a stand sort of holding him in position. This was very much a thing that was used. Yeah. Yeah.

It was like posing stands that look like a bit like a fork that you just like slot your head into one of the times of and then just wait. I don't know. After that, you go ahead and develop it. How do you develop it? Well, you slide into this box here that I've labeled number four. You put some mercury under it and then you light a alcohol lamp underneath that mercury and you let it with mercury.

My point mercury. Cool. That's a cool it. You let with Mercury. My boy, Mercury. Cool. That's a cool vapor to have around. That sounds safe. So you're a lot of fuming really is happening. You're having three or four different chemicals are competing to fuck you up. You're breathing in stuff not found in the Bible.

Yeah. I'm in the place to the bottom. You know, it's a lot of nasty chemicals, but it is missing exposed moving parts. That's true. It was very, I was getting pinched in the stand, I suppose. I'm just going to swap out chairs. I'm on a piano bench at a vanity of for in for in sisters vanity. I said you the image. I posted it on Twitter.

I'm on a piano bench at a vanity of for in sisters vanity. I said you the image. I posted it on Twitter. I'm on a piano bench at a vanity of for in sisters vanity. I said you the image. I posted it on Twitter.

I'm on a piano bench at a vanity of for in sisters vanity. I said you the image. I want a piano bench at a vanity of for a princesses vanity. I've sent you the image. I posted it on Twitter. I have seen the image. It will be in the episode now. I'm here right here. Oh, yeah, you guys keep going. I'll be back in two minutes. Love you to both. All right. That's what thanks. And after you've fumed it with board mercury, what that's done is that's another displacement reaction that's left behind a thin layer of pure metallic silver in the shape of the image that you want to produce. But you still have to fix it which is to remove all of the unreacted silver and they use sodium fire sulfate for that, usually just a bath of it.

Hmm, seeing here with a guy squirting it all over his hands. That's right. You would use gloves if you're doing that now. Um, and I'm aware of at least two people who still do daguerreotypes now. No fucking clue. Why? But, um, I'm sure it's fun, but I, I just, I don't want to be human any shit with Mercury.

Like let alone the bromine, right? Yeah, I was, I don't need that kind of fume in my environment. Difficult to star too, especially the bromine.