Louis Marie Auguste Boutan was a marine biologist from Versailles. He took the help of his brother and a lab technician to develop their first underwater camera in 1893. It used dry glass photographic plates and required 30 minute-long exposures. They eventually used a rudimentary flash which would be placed on a barrel underwater to reduce the exposure time to a few seconds. He made the first underwater portrait of Emil Racovitza, a Romanian oceanographer, in 1899. The resulting image was sharp enough for one to read the text on the placard: “Photographie Sous Marine.”
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