In this video, I recreate some of the most fascinating photographic techniques ever invented — from pinhole cameras and RGB trichrome photography to wet plate collodion — and then explore them under a scanning electron microscope.

You'll see:

How pinhole cameras really work
Why making the pinhole smaller doesn't always improve image quality
How color photographs were created using black-and-white film
What film grain actually looks like under an optical microscope
Why a scanning electron microscope initially fails to reveal silver grains
How secondary and backscattered electrons show completely different information
A wet plate collodion selfie made from scratch
And finally... what a 19th-century photograph looks like at the micrometer scale.

Photography has changed dramatically over the last 170 years.
The chemistry hasn't.