S. D. (Samuel Dwight) Humphrey

Born in 1823, Samuel Dwight Humphrey was an American doctor who also became deeply involved in early photography. He worked as a portrait photographer and is remembered as a publisher and writer during the daguerreotype era, when photography was still a new and fast-changing craft.

He published Humphrey's Journal of Photography, one of the earliest photographic periodicals in the United States, and wrote instructional works including American Hand Book of the Daguerreotype, Photography, and A Practical Manual of the Collodion Process. His books were aimed at practitioners as well as curious newcomers, helping readers understand the materials, methods, and possibilities of early photographic processes.

Humphrey is also noted for making a multiple-exposure daguerreotype of the moon in 1849, showing how closely early photography was tied to experiment and invention. He died in 1883, but his books and journal remain a useful window into the first decades of photographic history.