Popularization of photography
The Daguerreotype proved popular as it responded to the demand for portraiture emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, may well have been the push for the development of photography.
But still daguerreotypes, while beautiful, were fragile and difficult to copy. A single photograph taken in a portrait studio could cost $1000 in 2006 dollars. Photographers also encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply, which eventually lead them back to Talbot's process. Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate, so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around.
In July of 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the dangerous portions of the process to others. Photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of Kodak Brownie. Very little has changed in chemical photography since then, though color film has become the standard, as well as automatic focus and automatic exposure.
Digital recording of images is becoming increasingly prevalent, as digital cameras allow instant previews on LCD screens among other benefits, and the resolution of top of the range models has exceeded high quality 35mm film while lower resolution models have become affordable. For the enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, little has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925.
