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How did Richard Beard make daguerreotype portraits more practical in London?
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History of photography
Child with Striped Dress (Younger Raab Child), autochrome photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907; in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Richard Beard made daguerreotype portraits more practical in London by securing exclusive rights to the American mirror camera and employing the chemist John Frederick Goddard to refine the exposure process.1
To overcome the challenge of long exposure times, Beard and Goddard utilized techniques such as increasing the light sensitivity of silver iodide plates using bromine vapors and filtering intense daylight through blue glass to reduce eye strain for the sitter. By opening the first photography studio in Europe at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1841, Beard successfully commercialized these advancements, reducing exposure times to between one and three minutes.1