The birth of the daguerrotype - picture of the day

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, spring 1838. The exposure time for daguerrotypes were usually over ten minutes, even in bright sunlight, so this normally bustling thoroughfare looks to be almost deserted as anything that moved would have not been captured on the plate. The most prominent figures: a bootblack and his customer at the bottom left of the frame, would have had to have stood still for that length of time, leading many people to believe that they were positioned there by Daguerre himself Illustration: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre