Cameras of this kind were used during the 18th and 19th century by artists and travelling tourists to sketch landscapes and buildings. A piece of transparent paper was placed on the matte screen. One could now trace the outlines of the subject as a guide for later elaborate sketching or painting. It was the predecessor of photographic cameras which, after 1839, could record the image by the reaction of chemical substances to light. Later the simple meniscus lenses were replaced by more corrected lens elements.

Item is a small, wooden camera obscura with a single meniskus lens to demonstrate function of matt glass focusing screen and focal length. It is a replica built in the style of the small "mousetrap" cameras designed by William Henry Fox Talbot in the mid 1830's. They were simple wooden boxes with a single lens used to expose paper negatives, sensitized by silver nitrate (the calotype or Talbotype process). Exposures often took hours, and Talbot had several of the cameras made by a local joiner near his country home in Laycock, Wiltshire.

This series consists of original and duplicate early cameras from the beginning of the history of photography. Based on the basic design of the camera obscura and produced between about 1820 and 1870, these simple devices were usually solid or sliding box cameras with uncomplicated lenses. The shutter was normally outside of the lens, in the form of a lens cap that was simple removed and replaced for exposure, or a rotating metal plate on the front of the lens, which held the aperture. These cameras mainly predated dry plate and flexible film photography, and were used to take Daguerreotype, wet-plate and salted paper photographs.

To browse the individual items in this series, click on the "View the list" link under the "File and item records are available for this series" title (to the right of the page).