A method of generating a negative picture from which additional prints can be produced. Although William Henry Fox Talbot was the first person to design the calotype, it was not long before other people developed it further, and considerably more advanced versions of the method eventually superseded it. The invention of celluloid roll film paved the way for the industrialization of the negative/positive photographic process.

A phrase derived from the military "advance guard" is often related to radical groups that broke with convention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Constructivism. These groups often advocated for radical aesthetics, artistic revolutions, and social reform, and were frequently tied to such causes. The term "avant-garde" is often contrasted with "modernism," which refers to a movement in which artists focused primarily on advancing art in terms of its own formal characteristics, rather than any kind of social transformation or revolution. The classic adage, "Art into Life!" has been modernized. It was a prevalent theme in avant-garde painting and photography, as opposed to the art-for-art's-sake rejuvenation of modernist architecture.

The Lumière brothers devised and patented Autochrome in 1903. A glass plate was coated with red, green, and blue potato starch and a black-and-white silver halide emulsion. In the 1930s, Kodachrome and Agfacolor replaced the process. A color-processed, printed-on-glass picture can be viewed by holding it up to the light or projecting light through it onto a wall or screen. This approach was popular from 1904 to 1940. The Lumiere brothers helped grow cinema and the projection of moving transparent images onto a screen.

Egg whites are used to make printing processes run more smoothly. Developed in the latter half of the 1840s by a Frenchman named Louis Desire Blanchard-Evrard (1802–72). This method was widely used up until the 1890s because it produced a clearer picture than earlier methods.

Zone focusing is a technique used to maintain focus in fast-paced scenarios, such as street photography, by setting the lens to manual focus and selecting a specific distance to be in focus.