What were the early cameras like?

In the early days of photography, the camera used by pioneers was nothing more than a homemade wooden box with a lens. Nipps, a French inventor, put an iron sheet coated with asphalt on the imaging surface of the black box, and let the light pass through the lens mounted on a closed wooden box, thus taking the world's first long-exposure photo.

1839, after Daguerre photography was published, Gill, a Parisian businessman, made a camera for the silver plate method. The camera body is two wooden square boxes nested together, which can be moved back and forth to adjust the focal length. The lens is wollaston achromatic lens made by Chevalier. Due to the long exposure time, this camera is mainly used to shoot still objects such as landscapes and buildings.

Cameras were used for portrait photography until 1840, when Walcott of new york invented the "mirror camera". This improved wooden camera has an opening in the front of the box, which illuminates the incoming image on a large concave mirror and then reflects it on a photosensitive plate about 5×6 cm. The final picture, though smaller, is brighter.

At the same time, the German Fu Lunda camera was also made. The camera uses a conical metal camera box, and the lens was taken by Hungarian mathematician Peter Zval (1807 ~ 189 1) and entrusted by Fu Lunda (18 12 ~ 1878) for the first time. Fu Lunda camera took a circular photo with a diameter of 3.5 inches, and the exposure speed was 30 times faster than any lens at that time. Fu Lunda camera instructions wrote:

It's cloudy in winter, 3 minutes and 30 seconds; In the shadow of clear weather, 1 min, 30 seconds to 2 minutes; In direct sunlight, 40 ~ 45 seconds.

Fu Lunda camera was launched on New Year's Day with the telephone number 184 1, which was very popular. Fu Lunda camera is the most popular camera in the world, until Zeiss released the portrait lens developed by Rudolph in 1890.