First ever photographic portrait revealed

Very cool. He looks like a villain. You think he looks a bit like that guy from True Blood?

Wonder what he was thinking for that one minute, sitting in front of the camera..

Wonder what he was thinking for that one minute, sitting in front of the camera.. Should've brushed my hair!

Wonder what he was thinking for that one minute, sitting in front of the camera.. I'm the first on my block to get one of these! When I magnified it even more I noticed: It looks like back then placing your hand across your lapel and folding your fingers closed on the lapel was the very cool thing to do!

You think he looks a bit like that guy from True Blood? He does! Wait a minute ... is that Sookie in the background? ... That 1839 photo has amazing clarity. Most photos were of medium to poor clarity until the 1880s or 1890s, when glass grinding and the photographic process became more precise. Some years ago, I attended the annual Mountain Man rendezvous at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. A vendor there had built a wooden camera box with original glass lenses he recovered from an irrepairable camera of the 1860s. He took portraits of the reenactors, dressed as Mountain Men, Indians and soldiers from ... [More]

Nice entry!

He does look like a villain. Cool.

I saw that Cornelius photo years ago. It's amazing how long ago it was taken.

Cornelius - who was 30 years old when he took that photo of himself - wrote on the back of that photo that it was the first photo ever taken. He was wrong. The first ever photograph was taken in 1826 by the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. In 1826, in the window of his upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras, in eastern France, he set up a camera obscura, placed within it a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum), and uncapped the lens. After at least a day-long exposure of eight hours, the plate was removed ... [More]

Although not a portrait, this picture was taken by Nicephore Niepce in 1825