South Bank Meander

I've been to the New England area of the US this time of year - October - quite a few times over the past few years. You can take a chance with the weather - some days can be cold and miserable - but often you
get a glorious Autumn (should that be Fall ?) day with bright sunshine, blue skies and half way decent temperatures. Add in the colours (colors ?) of the foliage and it can be, as I say, glorious.

Monday last, in London, was almost such a day. Bright sunshine, blue skies and half way decent temperatures, Yes. Foliage in full Fall Colour, definitely Not. I have yet to see anything in the UK which matches the scale and variety of colours found in New England - in Autumm - something which the locals here in London seem to have difficulty believing.

Anyway, I took a walk along the South Bank in London then, and for once (if you have read some of my earlier posts) ignored the people (along with  the boring trees) and photographed some of the sights ......

Eadweard Muybridge Exhibition at Tate Britain

Enjoyed visiting the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at Tate Britain last week. This is the third exhibition I've been to in the last year or so, in London, featuring works of 19th Century photographers. The other two exhibitions were Camille Silvy at the National Portrait Gallery and Points of View and you may have read my previous posts on them.

Muybridge is probably better known for “Animals in Motion” photographs, and these are well represented in this exhibition. What is more interesting to me was his earlier photographs, his landscapes taken in Yosemite, the reportage style stereo pictures and the large panoramas of San Francisco,

From the viewpoint of the early years of the 21^st century we are well used to manipulation in photography; the personal computer and digital camera have made that fairly straight forward. Silvy and Muybridge were using the technology available at the time – mid/late nineteenth century – which was the wet collodion process and large format glass plate negatives. Some of Muybridge’s negatives were 17 inch by 22 inches, and yet he managed the make prints from multiple negatives for examples clouds from Pigeon Point Lighthouse were printed into later photos of the Mariposa Trail in Yosemite.

I really must get to Yosemite next time I'm in California.