Re: XIX century enlargers
On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:08:34 -0300, "Jacques Augustowski" <py1hy@terra.com.br> said: > Hi, > Does anyone knows if albumen was used with the solar enlargers? What is > the approximate date that these enlargers were used? > Thanks, > Jacques A quick reply (not much time these days!) but here's my suggestion. A paper titled "Photographic Enlarging: A History" by Eugene Ostroff of Smithsonian Institution was published in Photographic Science and Engineering 28: 54-89 (1984). This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the history of photographic technology. It also has many beautiful illustrations depicting how things were done in old days. The following is OCR text from my personal digital library, so beware of some machine conversion errors. Randomly appearing numbers are the references/notes. Any decent library should have this journal in collection... (actually this is the test I use to determine a library good or bad so that much is kinda obvious...) ABSTRACT This paper provides a survey of the early history of photographic enlarging. It includes: (1) precursor devices; camera obscura, magic lantern, projecting solar telescope, solar and lucernal microscopes, (2) photographic enlarging systems; those designed for photomicro- graphy, those which used cameras to copy photographs onto larger sensitized surfaces, special1y designed equipment to enlarge trans- parent negatives, and cameras which made large negatives when photographing the original subject, (3) ilIuminants; both sunlight and artificial (carbon arc,limelight, kerosene, gas, magnesium, acetylene and electric lamps), (4) optics, (5) exposure problems, (6) sensitized materials, printing.out and developing-out types. SOME RANDOM EXCERPTS... For a long period thereafter, until transparent negativ!.'~ were introduced (albumen glass plate, 1847, and wet collodil" glass plate, 1851), enlarger design basically followed tlw Herschel arrangement-camera-like apparatus which pho- tographed one image, in an enlarged version, onto a sensitized material. Alternate approaches were limited by the opaque or translucent characteristics of the early image supports, i.e., daguerreotypes, photogenic drawings, and calotypes. The inherent problems of paper negatives-the light-impeding, fibrous characteristics of the paper support and the extremely slow response of early sensitized enlarging materials made it impossible to consider direct-projection enlargement of the~e images by transmitted light. [...] "Make up your mind, if you wish a good picture, to be now a prisoner for two or three hours," declared John Stuart of Glasgow in December 1862, when he talked about his en- larging exposures. He installed a Woodward Solar Camera vertically in a small structure located in his garden where it was free of shadows from other buildings or trees. Exposures from 21/4H X 3lJ4" negatives on his 14" X 17" albumen paper required two to three hours and he used a hand-adjusted mirror to track the sun. Stuart displayed four enlargements at the December 6, 1862, meeting of the Glasgow Photographic Association; prints which represented his entire production for a full workday.1I0 [...] The work done by the Moore solar printing establishment captured the attention of Dr. H. W. Vogel, who in September 1870 observed that "we have nothing like these in Europe." Moore used a battery of eighteen solar enlargers clustered on his roof to take advantage of an unobstructed view of the sun. Vogel stated "on a clear day, you will see these curious looking instruments, marshalled in formidable array on the roof, with their one great eye pointed toward the sun, silently but surely doing their work. It is a curious sight from the street ... especially when the attendants are busy adjusting the great monsters. The looker ... maddens himself guessing what those fellows are about." Moore used Liébert solar enlargers and charged only two-and-a-half dollars for a large·sized en- largement.I23 His albumen papers came from two sources, a local manufacturer and one in Dresden; these papers, sensi- tized and dried in his own darkrooms, required exposures of about forty-five minutes. He adopted a mass-production ap- proach of using one person to operate eighteen enlargers.124 Dr. Vogel reported that "The American photographer simply mails his photograph with a ten-cent stamp to a photo-finisher ... and for $2.50 he receives a life-size picture, more beautiful than we can make it in Europe-a picture so full of effect that we would willingly pay double the amount if we only could get it."125 -- Ryuji Suzuki http://silvergrain.org
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