Daguerreotype - Key West Florida 1849

The daguerreotype was the earliest practical photographic process, and was especially suited to portraiture. It was made by exposing the image on a sensitized silver-plated sheet of copper, and as a result, the surface of a daguerreotype is highly reflective. There is no negative used in this process, and the image is almost always reversed left to right. Sometimes a mirror inside the camera was used to correct this reversal.