photographic society

photographic [‚fəʊtəʊ'græfɪk]

adjective

photographique;

∎ to have a photographic memory avoir une bonne mémoire visuelle

►► photographic library photothèque f;

photographic shop magasin m de photo;

photographic society club m d'amateurs de photo

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Waterhouse spent most of his career in the Indian Army. In 1861–2 he was commissioned to photograph the tribes of central India, and over the next few years visited many parts of the subcontinent. In November 1866, after working for five months in the Great Trigonometrical Survey learning the process of photozincography (an early photomechanical process used chiefly for map making), he took charge of photographic operations at the Surveyor-General's office in Calcutta, a post he held until retiring in 1897. During this time he developed many improvements in the photomechanical methods used for reproduction in his office. He also experimented with methods of colour-sensitizing photographic materials, experimenting with eosine dye and publishing in 1875 the fact that this made silver halide salts sensitive to yellow light. He also discovered that gelatine dry plates could be made sensitive to red and infra-red illumination by treatment with alizarine blue solution.

He continued his researches upon his retirement and return to England in 1897, and made a special study of the early history of the photographic process. His work on dye sensitizing brought him the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society, and the Vienna Photographic Society awarded him the Voigtländer Medal for researches in scientific photography. One invention often erroneously attributed to him is the Waterhouse stop, the use of a series of perforated plates as a means of adjusting the aperture of a photographic lens. This was described in 1858 by a John Waterhouse, being his only contribution to photography.

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Born of English parents and educated in Paris, Acres travelled to England in the 1880s. He worked for the photographic manufacturing firm Elliott \& Co. in Barnet, near London, and became the Manager. He became well known through his frequent lectures, demonstrations and articles in the photographic press. The appearance of the Edison kinetoscope in 1893 seems to have aroused his interest in the recording and reproduction of movement.

At the beginning of 1895 he took his idea for a camera to Robert Paul, an instrument maker, and they collaborated on the building of a working camera, which Acres used to record the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race on 30 March 1895. He filmed the Derby at Epsom on 29 May and the opening of the Kiel Canal in June, as well as ten other subjects for the kinetoscope, which were sold by Paul. Acres's association with Paul ended in July 1895. Acres had patented the camera design, the Kinetic Lantern, on 27 May 1895 and then went on to design a projector with which he gave the first successful presentation of projected motion pictures to take place in Britain, at the Royal Photographic Society's meeting on 14 January 1896. At the end of the month Acres formed his own business, the Northern Photographic Company, to supply film stock, process and print exposed film, and to make finished film productions.

His first shows to the public, using the renamed Kineopticon projector, started in Piccadilly Circus on 21 March 1896. He later toured the country with his show. He was honoured with a Royal Command Performance at Marlborough House on 21 July 1896 before members of the royal family. Although he made a number of films for his own use, they and his equipment were used only for his own demonstrations. His last contribution to cinematography was the design and patenting in 1898 of the first low-cost system for amateur use, the Birtac, which was first shown on 25 January 1899 and marketed in May of that year. It used half-width film, 17.5 mm wide, and the apparatus served as camera, printer and projector.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

A chemist by training, Hunt took an early interest in photography and during the 1840s devised several original photographic processes and techniques. The properties of iron sulphate as a developing agent, widely used by wet-collodion photographers, were first described by Hunt in 1844. He was a prolific author and it was as a writer that he was most influential. In 1841 he published the first substantial English-language photographic manual, a work that was to run to six editions. Perhaps his most important work was his Researches on Light, first published in 1844, with a second edition containing considerable additional material appearing in 1854. In 1851 Hunt was appointed Professor of Mechanical Science at the Royal School of Mines in London. He was a founder member of the London (later Royal) Photographic Society in 1853.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Ferdinand Hurter worked for three years as a dyer's apprentice before entering the Polytechnic in Zurich; he transferred to Heidelberg, where he graduated in 1866. A year later he secured an appointment as a chemist for the British alkali manufacturing company, Gaskell, Deacon \& Co. of Widnes, Cheshire. In 1871 he was joined at the company by the young engineer Vero Charles Driffield, who was to become his co-worker. Driffield had worked for a professional photographer before beginning his engineering apprenticeship and it was in 1876, when Hurter sought to draw on this experience, that the partnership began. At this time the speed of the new gelatine halide dry plates was expressed in terms of the speed of a wet-collodion plate, an almost worthless concept as the speed of a collodion plate was itself variable. Hurter and Driffield sought to place the study of photographic emulsions on a more scientific basis. They constructed an actinometer to measure the intensity of sunlight and in 1890 published the first of a series of papers on the sensitivity of photographic plates. They suggested methods of exposing a plate to lights of known intensities and measuring the densities obtained on development. They were able to plot curves based on density and exposure which became known as the H \& D curve. Hurter and Driffield's work allowed them to express the characteristics of an emulsion with a nomenclature which was soon adopted by British plate manufacturers. From the 1890s onwards most British-made plates were identified with H \& D ratings. Hurter and Driffield's partnership was ended by the former's death in 1898.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

Wenham trained as a marine engineer and later specialized in screw propellers and high-pressure engines. He had many interests. He took his steamboat to the Nile and assisted the photographer F.Frith to photograph Egyptian tombs by devising a series of mirrors to deflect sunlight into the dark recesses. He experimented with gas engines and produced a hot-air engine. Wenham was a leading, if controversial, figure in the Microscopical Society and a member of the Royal Photographic Society; he developed an enlarger.

Wenham was interested in both mechanical and lighter-than-air flight. One of his friends was James Glaisher, a well-known balloonist who made many ascents to gather scientific information. When the (Royal) Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1866, the Rules were drawn up by Wenham, Glaisher and the Honorary Secretary, F.W.Brearey. At the first meeting of the Society, on 27 June 1866, "On aerial locomotion and the laws by which heavy bodies impelled through the air are sustained" was read by Wenham. In his paper Wenham described his experiments with a whirling arm (used earlier by Cayley) to measure lift and drag on flat surfaces inclined at various angles of incidence. His studies of birds' wings and, in particular, their wing loading, showed that they derived most of their lift from the front portion, hence a long, thin wing was better than a short, wide one. He published illustrations of his glider designs covering his experiments of c. 1858–9. One of these had five slender wings one above the other, an idea later developed by Horatio Phillips. Wenham had some success with a model, but no real success with his full-size gliders.

In 1871, Wenham and John Browning constructed the first wind tunnel designed for aeronautical research. It utilized a fan driven by a steam engine to propel the air and had a working section of 18 in. (116 cm). Wenham continued to play an important role in aeronautical matters for many years, including a lengthy exchange of ideas with Octave Chanute from 1892 onwards.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of a tax collector, Ducos du Hauron began researches into colour photography soon after the publication of Clerk Maxwell's experiment in 1861. In a communication sent in 1862 for presentation at the Académie des Sciences, but which was never read, he outlined a number of methods for photography of colours. Subsequently, in his book Les Couleurs en photographie, published in 1869, he outlined most of the principles of additive and subtractive colour photography that were later actually used. He covered additive processes, developed from Clerk Maxwell's demonstrations, and subtractive processes which could yield prints. At the time, the photographic materials available prevented the processes from being employed effectively. The design of his Chromoscope, in which transparent reflectors could be used to superimpose three additive images, was sound, however, and formed the basis of a number of later devices. He also proposed an additive system based on the use of a screen of fine red, yellow and blue lines, through which the photograph was taken and viewed. The lines blended additively when seen from a certain distance. Many years later, in 1907, Ducos du Hauron was to use this principle in an early commercial screen-plate process, Omnicolore. With his brother Alcide, he published a further work in 1878, Photographie des Couleurs, which described some more-practical subtractive processes. A few prints made at this time still survive and they are remarkably good for the period. In a French patent of 1895 he described yet another method for colour photography. His "polyfolium chromodialytique" involved a multiple-layer package of separate red-, green-and blue-sensitive materials and filters, which with a single exposure would analyse the scene in terms of the three primary colours. The individual layers would be separated for subsequent processing and printing. In a refined form, this is the principle behind modern colour films. In 1891 he patented and demonstrated the anaglyph method of stereoscopy, using superimposed red and green left and right eye images viewed through green and red filters. Ducos du Hauron's remarkable achievement was to propose theories of virtually all the basic methods of colour photography at a time when photographic materials were not adequate for the purpose of proving them correct. For his work on colour photography he was awarded the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in 1900, but despite his major contributions to colour photography he remained in poverty for much of his later life.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of a hatter, Bennett studied medicine and was interested in mechanical devices, chemistry and later photography. An interior view shown at a South London Photographic Society meeting in March 1878 prompted requests for details of Bennett's procedure, and these were published almost immediately. It involved heating gelatine silver bromide for extremely long periods with an excess of silver bromide. The resulting emulsion had greatly enhanced sensitivity. This "ripening" process proved to be a major advance in the development of modern photographic emulsions. It was not patented and was soon widely adopted. Bennett's process became a key factor in the establishment of a new industry, the mass production of gelatine dry plates.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Ives trained as a printer in Ithaca, New York, and became official photographer at Cornell University at the age of 18. His research into photomechanical processes led in 1886 to methods of making halftone reproduction of photographs using crossline screens. In 1881 he was the first to make a three-colour print from relief halftone blocks. He made significant contributions to the early development of colour photography, and from 1888 he published and marketed a number of systems for the production of additive colour photographs. He designed a beam-splitting camera in which a single lens exposed three negatives through red, green and blue filters. Black and white transparencies from these negatives were viewed in a device fitted with internal reflectors and filters, which combined the three colour separations into one full-colour image. This device was marketed in 1895 under the name Kromskop; sets of Kromograms were available commercially, and special cameras, or adaptors for conventional cameras, were available for photographers who wished to take their own colour pictures. A Lantern Kromskop was available for the projection of Kromskop pictures. Ives's system enjoyed a few years of commercial success before simpler methods of making colour photographs rendered it obsolete. Ives continued research into colour photography; his later achievements included the design, in 1915, of the Hicro process, in which a simple camera produced sets of separation negatives that could be printed as dyed transparencies in complementary colours and assembled in register on paper to produce colour prints. Later, in 1932, he introduced Polychrome, a simpler, two-colour process in which a bipack of two thin negative plates or films could be exposed in conventional cameras. Ives's interest extended into other fields, notably stereoscopy. He developed a successful parallax stereogram process in 1903, in which a three-dimensional image could be seen directly, without the use of viewing devices. In his lifetime he received many honours, and was a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal in 1903 for his work in colour photography.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Born of French parents, Lippman's work began with a distinguished career in classics, philosophy, mathematics and physics at the Ecole Normale in Luxembourg. After further studies in physics at Heidelberg University, he returned to France and the Sorbonne, where he was in 1886 appointed Director of Physics. He was a leading pioneer in France of research into electricity, optics, heat and other branches of physics.

In 1886 he conceived the idea of recording the existence of standing waves in light when it is reflected back on itself, by photographing the colours so produced. This required the production of a photographic emulsion that was effectively grainless: the individual silver halide crystals had to be smaller than the shortest wavelength of light to be recorded. Lippman succeeded in this and in 1891 demonstrated his process. A glass plate was coated with a grainless emulsion and held in a special plate-holder, glass towards the lens. The back of the holder was filled with mercury, which provided a perfect reflector when in contact with the emulsion. The standing waves produced during the exposure formed laminae in the emulsion, with the number of laminae being determined by the wavelength of the incoming light at each point on the image. When the processed plate was viewed under the correct lighting conditions, a theoretically exact reproduction of the colours of the original subject could be seen. However, the Lippman process remained a beautiful scientific demonstration only, since the ultra-fine-grain emulsion was very slow, requiring exposure times of over 10,000 times that of conventional negative material. Any method of increasing the speed of the emulsion also increased the grain size and destroyed the conditions required for the process to work.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Auguste and his brother Louis Lumière (b. 5 October 1864 Besançon, France; d. 6 June 1948 Bandol, France) developed the photographic plate-making business founded by their father, Charles Antoine Lumière, at Lyons, extending production to roll-film manufacture in 1887. In the summer of 1894 their father brought to the factory a piece of Edison kinetoscope film, and said that they should produce films for the French owners of the new moving-picture machine. To do this, of course, a camera was needed; Louis was chiefly responsible for the design, which used an intermittent claw for driving the film, inspired by a sewing-machine mechanism. The machine was patented on 13 February 1895, and it was shown on 22 March 1895 at the Société d'Encouragement pour l'In-dustrie Nationale in Paris, with a projected film showing workers leaving the Lyons factory. Further demonstrations followed at the Sorbonne, and in Lyons during the Congrès des Sociétés de Photographie in June 1895. The Lumières filmed the delegates returning from an excursion, and showed the film to the Congrès the next day. To bring the Cinématographe, as it was called, to the public, the basement of the Grand Café in the Boulevard des Capuchines in Paris was rented, and on Saturday 28 December 1895 the first regular presentations of projected pictures to a paying public took place. The half-hour shows were an immediate success, and in a few months Lumière Cinématographes were seen throughout the world.

The other principal area of achievement by the Lumière brothers was colour photography. They took up Lippman's method of interference colour photography, developing special grainless emulsions, and early in 1893 demonstrated their results by lighting them with an arc lamp and projecting them on to a screen. In 1895 they patented a method of subtractive colour photography involving printing the colour separations on bichromated gelatine glue sheets, which were then dyed and assembled in register, on paper for prints or bound between glass for transparencies. Their most successful colour process was based upon the colour-mosaic principle. In 1904 they described a process in which microscopic grains of potato starch, dyed red, green and blue, were scattered on a freshly varnished glass plate. When dried the mosaic was coated with varnish and then with a panchromatic emulsion. The plate was exposed with the mosaic towards the lens, and after reversal processing a colour transparency was produced. The process was launched commercially in 1907 under the name Autochrome; it was the first fully practical single-plate colour process to reach the public, remaining on the market until the 1930s, when it was followed by a film version using the same principle.

Auguste and Louis received the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in 1909 for their work in colour photography. Auguste was also much involved in biological science and, having founded the Clinique Auguste Lumière, spent many of his later years working in the physiological laboratory.

[br]