Night photography

The development of mechanical clock drives meant cameras attached to telescopes could eventually capture successful images of celestial objects.

Tracking errors in guiding the telescope during the long exposure meant the photograph came out as an indistinct fuzzy spot.

John William Draper made the first successful photograph of the moon a year later on March 23, 1840, taking a 20-minute-long daguerreotype image using a 5-inch (13 cm) reflecting telescope.

Photography at night found several new practitioners in the 1970s, beginning with the black and white photographs that Richard Misrach made of desert flora (1975–77).

Jan Staller's twilight color photographs (1977–84) of abandoned and derelict parts of New York City captured the urban landscape lit by sodium vapor street lights.

His black-and-white landscapes were most often set between dusk and dawn in locations that included San Francisco, Japan, France, and England.

His subjects included the Ford Motor Company's Rouge River plant, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in the East Midlands in England, and many of the Nazi concentration camps scattered across Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Austria.

In the late 1940s early 1950s, O. Winston Link was fascinated by the big steam locomotives of the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W).