This daguerreotype portrait of the botanist Richard Buxton holding a sprig of flowers is infused with quiet dignity. Although Buxton earned a living as a shoemaker, he became an expert on the flora common to the Manchester countryside. Similarly, the photographer John Benjamin Dancer came to his art from another profession. As an optician, Dancer established a successful business in Manchester making optical lenses and instruments, and is credited with inventing microphotography and the binocular stereoscopic camera. He experimented with early paper photographs in the 1830s, but seized on Daguerre's process when it was published in 1839, impressed by the "beautiful pictures" it afforded.