Saturday, September 27, 2008

Faeries do exist


This is from a shoot recently of a real faery!!!

Boulevard du Temple

Daguerre

Daguerre and his collaborator Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (who died in 1833) had been working for a decade on a more efficient photographic procedure. On behalf of the Académie des sciences, the politician and scientist François Arago had announced the perfected daguerreotype method in early January 1839. Excited write-ups of Daguerre's achievements soon began appearing across Europe as well as in the US press. The first of the latter was published in the Boston Daily Advertiser of 23 February 1839. Morse's article was printed in the New-York Observer of 20th April in the same year. It was originally written as a letter to his brothers Sidney and Richard Morse, who were the paper's editors. In the first part of his report, which I cite here, Samuel Morse describes his visit to Daguerre's "Diorama" building at the corner of rue Sanson and rue des Marais on 7 March, where he was shown examples of Daguerre's work.


Morse was especially taken with Daguerre's famous image, Boulevard du Temple, a view of the northern end of the street whose remains, post-Haussmann, now lie underneath roughly the middle of the place de la République:

The exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it. For example: In a view up the street, a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful lens, which magnified 50 times, applied to the delineation, every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and also were the minutest breaks and lines in the walls of the buildings, and the pavements of the street. The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of the telescope in nature.
Objects moving are not impressed. The Boulevard, so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages, was perfectly solitary, except an individual who was having his boots brushed. His feet were compelled, of course, to be stationary for some time, one being on the box of the boot-black, and the other on the ground. Consequently, his boots and legs are well defined, but he is without body or head because these were in motion.

Friday, September 26, 2008

A lovely venue for a wedding


I was in Sheffield a few weeks ago photographing a friends wedding. The reception was at the Whitley hall hotel. All I can say is go there enjoy the food because its superb! and there are peacocks in the garden to boot!!!

My gran must of given me some skills

My 1st post


Well here we are, it's my 1st proper post, and I thought i'd tell you a little bit about me.

I have been a keen Photographer as long as I can remember. I guess it all stemmed from my Father who was a Policeman for many years. I used to love going to the station with him and seeing their hi-tec cameras, which by todays standards were probably as good as the cardboard throw aways we all have today. Dad also had his own dark room at home, and I remember being enthralled watching his pictures develop under that dull red light bulb.

My first camera was named Klack, which I think was made by Kodak and I loved it. I then moved on to a Zenith which took great shots, after a few years with my faithyfull Zenith i upgraded, and like everyone else I had an Olympus OM10 then to an OM20 with a screw on motor drive (cool eh!) and by the way I still have that camera and all its attachments! (and I still use it too).Then I think it was a Nikon and boy was that neat with its built in motordrive......Ah then the arrival of digital. I can still remember my first one, less than one million megapixels, but at ther time it was great. I slowly moved up in pixels, but still kept the best pictures to film. But now digital has really taken over, and apart from my old film cameras that I use for pleasure only now, I have finally totally swapped over to Canon digital.

I think it's great, that today photography is available to the masses.. It means we can all capture a little bit of the past for the future, I have been very lucky in the fact that my family going back generations have taken pictures but not all familys have been that fortunate. I know plenty of people that tell me i'm lucky to have pictures of my family going back 100 years, and they tell me they only have one of them as a child. So get out there and capture some history for your generations!

One of my hobbies is using very old cameras when I can find the film supplies. I was given a really old 1920's stills camera and cine camera which dates back to the 50's. They have been a lot of fun to use, it transports me back in history

Hello And Welcome

As it says, hello and welcome. This blog is hopefully going to be enjoyed by many people. I will be posting photographs and information from Cornwall.