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earliest nighttime shots film history


Costanza Julia Bani

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Hej there!

For an artistic research project and a paper I am proposing to write for an academic journal in the Scandinavian countries (VIS) I am looking for historic shots / archive footage of the earliest nighttime shots night for night. I am trying to find out - and it seems more difficult than I expected - who has done the first nighttime shots and with what camera and how was the lighting set-up.

It was easy to find out for still photography.  After the first daylight photography was taken in 1922 it took almost twenty years to realize the same feature at night. In 1839, LJM. Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype method, is credited to have taken the first photograph at night, even if it was actually a blurry picture of the moon taken through a telescope. 1840 J.W. Draper used a complex method involving a double convex lens and a specially prepared development plate to capture the moon. The halo around the celestial object became a distinctive feature of many nighttime shots. It was also the start of a trend in astrophotography, where secrets of distant starts were impressed on film, using cameras connected to telescopes.

 BUT MY QUESTION IS: ANYONE KNOWS WHO DID THIS FOR MOTION PICTURES? Was it Murnau's dop in 1927 in Sunrise? Were the nighttime scenes shot at all shot in exterior?

THANKFUL FOR HELP! Here is my University email: costanzajulia.bani@uniarts.se 

Costanza 

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