My favourite nineteenth-century photographs are the ones from the early years of the technology's development, when exposures had to be extremely long due to the photographic plates' lack of light-sensitivity. Take View from the Window at Le Gras (1826), for example: the buildings on the left and right are both in full sunlight... because the picture took eight hours to execute!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghooKu9CnKGcstIgY9kfeKR1-pHRKxma8qh38mquuazJQdISe37agJ6SJ0IEex_Njw7SIyVojQw9oPhYUq-qFuDPNWHCKwm1xz1n6EWeMnTy_V2uMJveupXCVmiO-CBdlqY5wSJVHmYgI/s320/View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras,_Joseph_Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce.jpg)
The consequence of this was that pictures of busy scenes like the one below, of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, show streets devoid of traffic. The ten-minute exposure meant that the constantly-moving people and vehicles became no more than a faint collective blur in the final image. That is, apart from one person: a nameless man who, while having his shoes shined, became the first person in history to have their photo taken.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1XRo1aRDNTHciLFN7hYQf1WU5RohrlYSJ7SO4BXw9Y-7c_hr7iEpAdc7A43nZXrkdw-52ZN5dvgEyyrx2g7GftBXdVRnKZz45dUnMqyXUoPLdPFYkoEbvEPatVmBxR2OTjn-jL_pYWCo/s320/Boulevard_du_Temple_by_Daguerre.jpg)
Come back on Monday at 1.37pm for another installment in my new series of ramblings on long-exposure photography!