ABSTRACT
Beginning with the discovery of how to make permanent silver-halide photographic images in the early nineteenth century, photography has not slowed in its transformation into today’s digital platforms. This chapter highlights a small portion of scientific photography’s history and explores the beginnings of scientific photography applications and inherent challenges, as well as the advancement of tools. As knowledge and technology have advanced, photographic practices have become even more integral to exploration, discovery, and publishing. Images can record what is not visible to the human visual system and they make permanent records of transient events that can serve as images for analysis. Pictures chronicle things where words would mostly be inadequate and images “remember” what the mind will forget. Images that feature science can often create conflictions for scientific viewers because scientists are taught that science should be factual and not be emotive.
