The Calotype essays

The Calotype essays The calotype, invented by William Fox Henry Talbot, is the basis of todays photographic process. His signature is Henry Talbot, and though he is said to have disliked being called Fox Talbot, that name has stuck. Fox Talbot was not the first to produce photographs; he made a major contribution to the photographic process, as we know it today. Talbot's calotype is a paper negative image from which an unlimited number of positives can be printed. The photographer could make different prints from the same negative because they had total control of the prints density. The earliest surviving paper negative is of the now famous latticed window of the library at Laycock Abbey, Wiltshire, where he lived. It is dated August 1835. The picture is small and poor in quality, compared with the striking images produced by the Daguerreotype process. Unlike Daguerre, Talbot did not receive any government help to develop his process. He used his own time and money to develop the calotype process. Though some of his pictures show a measure of artistic taste, it was his inability to produce pictures, which caused him to experiment with a mechanical method of capturing and retaining an image. Talbot used a camera obscura for his sketches, one of, which was Villa Melsi, sketched in 1832. Later he wrote: In October, 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como in Italy, taking sketches with a Camera Lucida, or rather, I should say, attempting to make them; but with the smallest possible amount of success... After various fruitless attempts I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing that unfortunately I did not possess. I then thought of trying again a method that I had tried many years before. This method was to take a Camera Obscura and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus - fairy pictures, creations of a mome...