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early photography

The Victorian death portrait: a family photo guaranteed to send shivers up your spine

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At a glance, this image looks like an old photograph of five somewhat bored children posing for a family photo. And indeed, it is. However, it hides a certain macabre secret: the smallest child on the far left is actually dead and is propped up on a stand.

To our modern standards, this seems rather creepy, but in the Victorian era, these ‘death portraits,’ as they became known, were very common. It offers a fascinating glimpse into what life may have been like for the early jobbing photographer of the Victorian period.

If you want to learn the original art of negative retouching, this book from 1908 will teach you how

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We all assume that Photoshop and the art of retouching is a fairly new phenomenon. When you think of image retouching you automatically think of celebrities made to look taller and slimmer, of blemish removal to the point of obliterating skin texture, and head swapping those pesky people that always blink in group portraits. But did you know that image retouching has been around nearly as long as photography, it was just done in a different way. This fascinating book (now in the public domain), tells you exactly how to get started if you want to retouch your images directly onto the negative.

The ABC of photography ‘types’

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Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph opened at Media Space, part of the Science Museum, in London last week. Using a mixture of images, artefacts, letters, and publications, the exhibition charts the development of photography by William Henry Fox Talbot against the backdrop of his contemporaries. For anyone with a smidgen of interest in the history or science of photography, it’s a must-see exhibition.

As I wandered about the exhibition, getting high on its heady mix of photography and history, it occurred to me that a crib sheet of the early photographic processes, detailing their steps and requirements as well as their progress and their pitfalls, would be a useful article. So here you have it: from daguerreotype to tintype, an ABC of early photography.

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