THE CHEMISTRY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN FULL DAYLIGHT

Abstract

Photography, the daughter of art, is also considered the well-bred child of science. From its very beginnings, the new visual art fully utilized the most advanced scientific discoveries pertinent to its development; particularly those occurring in the field of chemistry. The most notable advantage of photographic chemistry, in relation to chemical education, is found in its unique scope, which combines interesting inorganic, organic and physical chemistry with a powerful visual communication medium of tremendous social importance. Chemical educators dwelled on both the theoretical and the experimental aspects of photographic chemistry. Yet the proposed experiments do not involve the magical process of image development. In the present work, methods involving the rehalogenating bleaching of black and white photographs are presented and also experiments for the “development” of the bleached image in full daylight. The chemical topics that can be covered by such experiments range from the dissolution of metallic silver in dilute nitric acid to the reduction of silver ions using common organic reducing agents. [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. Eur.: 2000, 1, 175-177]