Architectural Photography
By the 1860s, commercial architectural photographers had begun to emerge in many large urban centres, addressing the specialized needs of architects, artisans, entrepreneurs and government officials in need of visual documentation and source material. In their photography of buildings, they adhered to a limited set of conventions in the form of axial, perspectival, and detailed views of the principal façades and interior spaces. These included documenting the construction, renovation, and, occasionally, demolition of domestic, civic, and engineering structures as well as records of the evolution of towns and cities.

Industrial Photography
Industrial photography is a photographic practice that takes place within an industrial organization, to document production processes, work organization, or culture of an enterprise. The use of photographs to depict industrial activity and products began in the 1850s and 1860s. Industrial photography cannot be tied to a particular aesthetic or function. There are innumerable links with other branches of the medium, such as portraiture, reportage, and architectural. Early industrial photography centred not on the individual worker but on plant, buildings, and the workforce as a group.

Ship and Railroad Photography
In general, major engineering projects such as shipbuilding or railway construction were photographed intensively. Well-known examples of the photographic documentation was the creation of the first US transcontinental railway and images of railway construction in British India. These photographs are among the most frequently reproduced examples of classic industrial photography. Less well known but equally spectacular are the early pictures of the vessels found on lakes, seas and rivers, illustrating that these vessels were key in history's great explorations and technological development.

Nude Photography
Nude photography is a style of art photography which depicts the nude human body as a study and is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person. Early photographers often depicted the nudity of women preferred to depict the lines of a body as a piece of art. They imported from the terminology of painting the terms art nude and figurenude to avoid suggestions that their works were erotica or pornography.

Ethnographic Photography
To fulfill the mounting and incessant demand for more images, photographers spread out to every corner of the world, recording all the natural and manufactured phenomena they could find. Ethnographic photography became an important genre. A number of photographers, including Timothy O'Sullivan, J. K. Hillers, and W. H. Jackson, accompanied exploratory expeditions to the new frontiers in the American West, while John Thomson returned from China and Maxime Du Camp from Egypt with records of vistas and peoples never before seen by Western eyes.

Documentary Photography
Photographic subject matter shifted from the past to the present. A present of new forms in machinery, architecture and new concerns with the experience of the working classes and the social changes. A new realism became the vogue in the 1870s, when some of the best photographers sought to make "straight" photographs: sharply focused, unmanipulated and unsentimental pictures. This was the beginning of the Documentary Photography, when the immediacy of repeated crime, warfare, and other shocking scenes where explored by the camera.