Microphotograph
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Microphotographs are photographs shrunk to microscopic scale.Focal encyclopedia of photography By Michael R. Peres
Focal Press, 2007 , 846 pages
Microphotography is the art of making such images. Applications of microphotography include
espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tang ...
such as in the Hollow Nickel Case, where they are known as
microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. ...
. Using the
daguerreotype Daguerreotype (; french: daguerréotype) was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process. Invented by Louis Daguerre a ...
process, John Benjamin Dancer was one of the first to produce microphotographs, in 1839. He achieved a reduction ratio of 160:1. Dancer perfected his reduction procedures with Frederick Scott Archer’s wet
collodion process The collodion process is an early photographic process. The collodion process, mostly synonymous with the "collodion wet plate process", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about ...
, developed in 1850–51, but he dismissed his decades-long work on microphotographs as a personal hobby, and did not document his procedures. The idea that microphotography could be no more than a novelty was an opinion shared by the 1858 ''Dictionary of Photography,'' which called the process "somewhat trifling and childish." Originally published in
Dictionary of Photography
' (1858).
Novelty viewing devices such as Stanhopes were once a popular way to carry and view microphotographs. An important application of microphotography is in
microform Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. ...
s.


See also

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Microprinting Microprinting is the production of recognizable patterns or characters in a printed medium at a scale that requires magnification to read with the naked eye. To the unaided eye, the text may appear as a solid line. Attempts to reproduce by meth ...
*
Macro photography Macro photography (or photomacrography or macrography, and sometimes macrophotography) is extreme close-up photography, usually of very small subjects and living organisms like insects, in which the size of the subject in the photograph is grea ...


References

{{Authority control Audiovisual introductions in 1839 Microscopy