Choose from Four Options

$599 for the Love that Doesn’t Bend Wedding Photography Package(a $1,300 value)

• Eight hours of wedding day coverage
• Online gallery
• USB flash drive or custom CD of edited images with print release<p>

$475 for the Circle Is Complete Wedding Photography Package (a $1,000 value)

• Six hours of wedding day coverage
• Online gallery
• Two 11”x14” prints
• CD of edited images with print release<p>

$390 for the Missing Piece Wedding Photography Package (an $800 value)

• Four hours of wedding day coverage
• Online gallery
• CD of edited images with print release<p>

$69 for a Family / Couples Photography Session (a $140 value)

• 60-minute photo session
• USB flash drive of edited images with print release<p>

Photography is a modern marvel whose roots stretch back nearly 200 years. Check out our guide to the world’s first exposure to photography—the daguerreotype.

Early Photography: Portraits of Invisible People

Before JPEGs, before flimsy Polaroids, before even black-and-white prints on cardboard stock, the earliest practical photography method—called the daguerreotype, after its inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre—could only capture images on a heavy metal plate. To take a picture, the photographer first had to coat a copper plate in silver, then cover it again with a vapor of bromide or halide. As the two chemicals combined, they formed photosensitive crystals on the surface, and the plate was placed into a camera and exposed to the subject. Doing so imprinted a latent image, invisible to the naked eye. To make it materialize, a treatment of mercury vapor washed the bromide or halide from the portions of the plate that received the most light, leaving only silver particles in the image’s highlights. Likewise, a dip into a fixer dissolved the silver from the less-exposed areas, and the resulting highlights and shadows formed a clear image of a family or a fruit bowl with a top hat.

One day in 1838, Daguerre tested his invention by pointing his camera over a busy Parisian boulevard. The result was a crisp, richly detailed portrait of city life, with only one thing missing: life. Since daguerreotypes required exposure times of 10–15 minutes, the camera never captured the people and wealthy horses that bustled along the street, making the City of Lights look more like a ghost town. One man, however, did stand still long enough to appear. He was getting his shoe shined, and his bent knee shows up clearly among the shadows of trees behind him. Doubtless the polish on the man’s shoes quickly scuffed and faded, but the polished silver plate endures as the earliest known photographic image of a person.