This article is quite eye-opening to me. Typically, photography for science is not covered as a part of the early history of photography. In fact, I just went back and flipped through the first few chapter of A World History of Photography and did not find any mentions of scientific photography — the age of daguerreotype is just a boring collection of portraits. I found it fascinating that they were able to take wet plate collodion on transatlantic expeditions as it is a painfully finicky process. I was in fact shocked that they were able to capture images of remote, dim celestial objects (even modern cameras require something like ISO 3200 and motorized star tracker gimbals, and wet plates’ ISO is usually below 10.) Seeing the power (and limitations) of early photographic technology and their applications, it really made me rethink the connection between art and science in the early ages of photography.
To me, the extreme scales at which modern imaging technology is capable of present many artistic opportunities. On the large side, satellites, drones, street views, etc. provides us with an unprecedented amount of data that can be utilized in art. Especially we the help of big-data processing tools (such as efficient object recognition,) it is possible to create a typological study without ever going to the place in person (e.g. using algorithms to sift through massive street view databases to find the object of interest.) On the small scale, high-definition optical microscopes and SEMs gave us many new opportunities to find interesting visuals at a completely different scale. Bio art, for example, is an interesting field that can potentially benefit from the ability to see tiny structures.