[custom_adv] Your wedding reception is easy to personalize—your ceremony, however, can be tougher. After all, most wedding ceremonies are rooted in tradition, and involve a series of predetermined steps that have been taken for years (if not centuries!). If you're looking to put your own stamp on the event, incorporate a ritual that symbolizes the reason why you, your spouse-to-be, and your guests are there on the big day: unity. [custom_adv] Some of the following customs and practices, like lighting a unity candle, circling the groom, or jumping the broom are rooted in faith or tradition. But others, like the sand or the tree-planting ceremony, are modern alternatives. While all represent the joining of two people—and familial and community togetherness—there might be a few that resonate more than others. Since no two weddings (or couples!) are the same, we made sure to keep all faiths, cultures, and beliefs in mind when curating this list. [custom_adv] Whether you steal one (or more!) of these ideas or would prefer to dream up something completely different, a ceremonial ritual is bound to bring even more meaning to your big day. These practices can tie your wedding back to marriages that took place hundreds of years ago—or inspire the generations of lovers to come. However you decide to signify unity on your big day, let the following historical, cultural, and spiritual symbolic rituals be your guide. [custom_adv] From 1835 to the early 21st century, our curators have picked some of the most important and memorable images in our care, providing a fascinating glimpse into the history of photography. [custom_adv] In 1834, five years before the public announcement of the daguerreotype, Talbot developed a process which produced a negative image on sensitised paper. The negative could then be used to create multiple positive photographs by contact printing. This photograph, Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey, taken in August 1835, is the earliest known surviving negative. [custom_adv] In September 1840, Talbot made a further vital breakthrough when he discovered that invisible, or ‘latent’, images were formed on sensitised paper even after relatively short exposure times. These images could be made visible, or ‘developed’, if treated with chemicals. By inventing the processes needed to make latent images visible and ‘fix’ them to stop them from fading, Talbot made the future development of photography possible. [custom_adv] Photography is so omnipresent today -whether in science, advertising, current events media, propaganda, or just our own snaps – it is hard to imagine a world without it. And yet 200 years ago it didn’t exist. [custom_adv] The word “photography” literally means “drawing with light”. The word was supposedly first coined by the British scientist Sir John Herschel in 1839 from the Greek words phos, meaning “light”, and graphê meaning “drawing or writing”. [custom_adv] In the period between the two Napoleons experiments were underway both in France and in England, and by the time Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon became Emperor of France in 1852, photography was creating its own small revolution. [custom_adv] The technology which led to the invention of photography essentially combines two distinct sciences: optics – the convergence of light rays to form an image inside a camera – and chemistry, to enable that image to be captured and recorded permanently onto a photosensitive (light-sensitive) surface. [custom_adv] Already during the Renaissance (several centuries earlier) artists had begun to use a sort of primitive “camera” called a camera obscura (a latin term meaning literally “dark room” from which is derived our modern word “camera”) to more accurately copy nature by means of drawing. [custom_adv] This naturally-occurring optical phenomenon had already been observed for hundreds (even thousands) of years: If a brightly lit scene or object is placed opposite a hole cut into the side of a darkened space (room or container), the rays of light reflected off that object, passing through the hole, converge into an upside-down image which can be seen to be “projected” onto the surface inside the container. [custom_adv] But the camera obscura only allowed for the viewing of that image in real time. In order to record it permanently, artists still had to trace the image by hand inside the camera. [custom_adv] Around 1800, in England, Thomas Wedgwood (son of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter) managed to produce inside a camera obscura a black and white negative image on paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate, a white chemical which was known to darken when exposed to light. [custom_adv] However, he was not able to fix the image permanently because the lighter parts of the image also became dark when looked at in the light for more than a few minutes. His discovery was reported in a scholarly journal in 1802 by a chemist Humphry Davy and translated into French. [custom_adv] Then, in 1816, (when Napoleon had just arrived on St Helena), a Frenchman, Nicéphore Nièpce, succeeded in capturing small camera images on paper treated with silver chloride (another chemical sensitive to light). However, like Wedgwood, he was not yet able to fix and preserve these images.
