Moses Billings
With the development of the daguerreotype in the 1840s, the role of the portrait painter declined in general, because it was now much easier and much cheaper to have one's likeness presented in a visual format. While many portrait painters lost business in competition with the daguerreotype, Billings instead began to produce daguerreotype prints himself. It is not known exactly which prints were made by Moses Billings, as daguerreotypes were usually signed, when signed at all, along the side of the plate. Due to the traditional storing methods of daguerreotype plates, even this signature usually quickly became illegible. However, it has been generally noted, or at least hypothesized, that his daguerreotype prints showed a level of talent and artistry above that of amateur daguerreotypists. Though it is not known exactly which prints were his, it is known that he had largely abandoned the process by the 1850s. Even after he stopped making daguerreotypes, he did continue to paint people's portraits on canvas.
Paper texture effects in calotype photography
Practical photography plausibly dates from the announcement of the Daguerreotype in 1839. This stimulated work by others: in 1840, the Englishman Talbot discovered what he called the calotype process for making photographic negatives on writing paper with the relatively short exposure time of a few minutes for subjects in bright sunlight. A positive print could subsequently be made by pressing a negative under glass against another piece of sensitive paper and exposing it to sunlight. For this, negatives were waxed to make them more transparent. Since many prints could be made from a single negative, travel photography became possible, and prints from calotypes were soon distributed in book form and sold in shops. The chemical operations used to make a calotype were not difficult to perform, and relatively few specialized supplies were required. But the process had a serious deficiency, and it was quickly replaced by photography on glass when this became practical.