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, as a subfield of the intelligence field, is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence). A person who commits espionage on a mission-specific contract is called an ...

such as in the Hollow Nickel Case, where they are known as

microfilm A microform is a scaled-down reproduction of a document, typically either photographic film or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original d ...

. Using the

daguerreotype Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photography, photographic process, widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process. Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwid ...

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 ] Frederick Scott Archer (1813 – 1 May 1857) was an English photographer and sculptor who is best known for having invented the photographic collodion process which preceded the modern photographic film, gelatin emulsion. He was born in either ...

's wet

collodion process The collodion process is an early photography, photographic process for the production of grayscale images. The collodion process – mostly synonymized with the term "''wet-plate process''", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensi ...

, 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.

References

{{Authority control Audiovisual introductions in 1839 Microscopy

See also

References