By the 1850s and 60s not only were photographic development processes getting faster and cheaper, cameras were also advancing – they became lighter, lenses improved, and exposure times dropped down to seconds rather than minutes. People were soon able to take photography out of controlled environments and go farther afield. One of the most obvious topics that drew such intrepid photographers was war. In 1969, Helmut and Alison Gernshiem wrote in The History of Photography that wars have always been exciting topics for pictures if the photographer is willing to venture into those war zones. They said that war photographers also took gambles when selling their photos to newspapers because they were also selling them to the public. Because newspapers into the late 1900s were printed in black and white, the public became accustomed to seeing "newsworthy" photographs in that format. 

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Serious photographs, real photographs, true photographs were in black and white. So confident was the public in this opinion that it became its own kind of fact for decades. As George Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company began to establish themselves as a dominant figure in the field of photography, even their efforts to introduce commercially available colour film were met with resistance. Photography had reached a point around the mid 1900s where a photograph was not taken seriously by the public or critics alike if it was in colour.