Holiday Treats: the spirit of the ‘Waites’ trumps ‘The Waits’

29 Dec 2017: guest post by Brian Liddy While scouring Talbot’s oeuvre for a seasonably festive image my eye kept being drawn to yet another photographic copy of a lithograph by the satirist HB Doyle, one titled “The Waits”. Accepting its content at face value, five street musicians livening up the atmosphere, I could picture it gracing an …

Holiday Treats: The Ghost on the Screen

22 Dec 2017: guest post by Brian Liddy It has been a while since I have highlighted my favourite tool available on the website, the ‘Image Comparison’ tool. In the preliminary Image Viewer I can adjust the contrast or brightness of a photograph in an attempt to see if it really is a ‘Portrait of a Man’ or …

Holiday Treats: The Talbot Family Christmas, Glimpsed

15 Dec 2017: In deference to your obligations to the world of commerce and more importantly to give you more time to enjoy the festive activities, each year around this time we switch over to the more compact ‘Holiday Treats’ format for the blog. With the very best wishes to you for the holiday season Larry guest post …

The positives of negatives – and displaying the unviewable

8 Dec 2017: In spite of the seemingly perverse efforts of the self-proclaimed ‘World’s favourite airline’, I’ve finally made it to Paris. The occasion is an international conference the subject of which would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Henry Talbot’s first friend in photography, the negative. Les négatifs papier français: production, caractérisation, conservation – French paper negatives: …

Talbot, Brunel and pile-driving with Brother Jonathan

1 Dec 2017: Today’s guest is Rose Teanby, a photohistorian so eager that she single-handedly located the long-neglected grave of the important photographer Robert Howlett and then raised funds for its restoration and rededication. Rose has a particular interest in photographic documentation of the great Victorian engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In an earlier blog, Talbot’s 16th c Photograph, …