On the Invention of Photography

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, it became fashionable to tour the English countryside, visiting castles, ruined abbeys, and picturesque landscapes. Those who had the ability would often sketch the vistas as a memento.

William Gilpin, in his essays on the picturesque, defined a picturesque landscape as one which was a good subject for a drawing or a painting — and so his observations are relevant to contemporary photographers.



Illustration from Gilpin’s Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: to which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting.

But not everyone is trained in drawing. As picturesque travel became more popular, new inventions such as the camera lucida helped novices sketch a landscape with more accuracy, while the Claude glass darkened and abstracted the scene, giving it a more painterly quality.

W. Henry Fox Talbot was in Italy on such a picturesque tour, and here he describes his experiences:

One of the first days of the month of October 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston's Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success. For when the eye was removed from the prism—in which all looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.

After various fruitless attempts, I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion, that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing, which unfortunately I did not possess.

I then thought of trying again a method which 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 transparent tracing paper laid on a pane of glass in the focus of the instrument. On this paper the objects are distinctly seen, and can be traced on it with a pencil with some degree of accuracy, though not without much time and trouble.

I had tried this simple method during former visits to Italy in 1823 and 1824, but found it in practice somewhat difficult to manage, because the pressure of the hand and pencil upon the paper tends to shake and displace the instrument (insecurely fixed, in all probability, while taking a hasty sketch by a roadside, or out of an inn window); and if the instrument is once deranged, it is most difficult to get it back again, so as to point truly in its former direction.

Besides which, there is another objection, namely, that it baffles the skill and patience of the amateur to trace all the minute details visible on the paper; so that, in fact, he carries away with him little beyond a mere souvenir of the scene—which, however, certainly has its value when looked back to, in long after years.

Such, then, was the method which I proposed to try again, and to endeavour, as before, to trace with my pencil the outlines of the scenery depicted on the paper. And this led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature's painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.

It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me…how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!

— from The Pencil of Nature, by William Henry Fox Talbot

Talbot is credited as one of the inventors of photography.

“St. Louis Parks”

ST. LOUIS PARKS — a new book from Reedy Press — with photography by yours truly, including the photo on the cover:



This view shows the World’s Fair Pavilion atop Government Hill, in Forest Park, in the City of Saint Louis, Missouri. Teenagers are seen here enjoying the cool water of the fountain on a warm June day. I think this photo adequately captures the joy and simple pleasure that ought to be found in a pleasant park.

This book contains over a hundred of my photos of parks located within the City of Saint Louis. Click here to get your own copy of this book:

From the publisher, Reedy Press:

St. Louis Parks By NiNi Harris and Esley Hamilton, Foreword by Peter H. Raven 

St. Louis has great parks. And St. Louisans are passionate about them. St. Louis Parks delivers portraits of St. Louis City and County parks, both major and minor, that prove why these common spaces are crucial to the region’s way of life.

Acclaimed local historians NiNi Harris and Esley Hamilton take readers through the city and county, respectively. Starting with the establishment of Lafayette Park from thirty acres of common fields in 1836, Harris covers the creation of gems like Tower Grove Park, the nation’s finest Victorian Park, and the dazzling, 1,293-acre Forest Park, while including Citygarden, and its interactive artwork, in the heart of downtown.

In the county, Hamilton highlights one-of-a-kind attractions like the renowned Museum of Transportation and Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Butterfly House and St. Louis Carousel at Faust Park, a farm zoo at Suson Park, and the military museums at Jefferson Barracks. In both sections, the authors recognize the citizens, civic leaders, and architects whose work delivered to all St. Louisans picturesque landscapes, ball fields, tennis courts, natural savannahs, and grasslands filled with wildlife, and trails that lead runners through forests and by shimmering lakes.

Dramatic photography by Mark Scott Abeln and Steve Tiemann complement the essays. The photographs evoke the unique character and history of the individual parks. They visualize the importance of green space for both escaping and coming together as a community.  

ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS 

NiNi Harris’s earliest memory is of an early autumn evening, picking up acorns as she and her father walked along Bellerive Boulevard to Bellerive Park. Her great- great-grandfather’s first job when he arrived in St. Louis in 1864 was planting trees in a St. Louis park. This is her tenth book on St. Louis history and architecture.

Esley Hamilton has been working for the St. Louis County Department of Parks and Recreation as historian and preservationist since 1977. Among preservation-
ists in the St. Louis region, Hamilton’s is a household name. He teaches the history of landscape architecture at Washington University and serves on the board of the National Association for Olmsted Parks.

Mark Abeln is a native of St. Louis and attended college at Caltech, in Pasadena, California. Mark started taking photography seriously after he took disappointing photos of an important subject. He spent the next years learning the art of photography, and his photos can now be found in numerous publications as well as on his website “Rome of the West.”

Steve Tiemann graduated from McCluer High School and went on to obtain his forestry degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Steve has enjoyed his career as a park ranger and park ranger supervisor with St. Louis County Parks for nearly thirty years. He tries to be in ready mode with a camera while patrolling on foot or bike.

Mr. Peter Raven is President Emeritus of the famed Missouri Botanical Garden.

This book’s publication date is May 1^st. You can order a copy now:

You can also purchase my earlier book of photography, Catholic St. Louis: A Pictorial History:

Introduction

WELCOME TO The Refracted Light, a website about the art and science of photography.

The name ‘Refracted Light’ refers to the process where waves, when hitting a boundary at an angle, will change velocity, and so will also change direction.  This principle is what makes optics and cameras possible: light waves, when hitting the glass of a lens at an angle, will be bent.  Lenses are precisely constructed to focus these light waves at a point, where an image can be captured. This name perhaps is evocative of photography.

But the name also comes from the poem Mythopoeia, by J.R.R Tolkien, who is better known for his epic novel of high fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. Quoting the poem:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Tolkien wrote this in defense of creative myth-making, rebutting his friend “who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’”. Tolkien's imagery can also apply to photography: a thousand photographers can each photograph the same scene with the same camera, yet a thousand different images result. Photography may be our most objective art form, but the single white light of Truth gets refracted through each person, producing many hues.

This is a website about photography, and not of photography.  I do not plan to showcase my photography here, other than as useful illustrations.  You can find my photography on my other website Rome of the West, which is:

A web log about Catholicism in Saint Louis, which was once called the “Rome of the West”. Topics of interest are the historical Catholic patrimony of our City, the restoration of Catholic culture, manners, and morals, increasing public and private piety, and fostering interest in the liturgical arts.

It is a common rule of publishing that if you write about subjects A and B, you will only get readers who like both A and B, and not readers who like one or the other.  This is why I created this new website. Taste in photography also varies, and as I hope what appears on this page is useful, I'd rather not turn away those readers who do not share my taste in photos.

So I intend to write about the more certain, objective factors in photography, things that are less a matter of personal taste and legitimate varying opinion. The laws of physics are objective, the operation of specific cameras is in principle knowable, but even some subjective factors can be known objectively to a good degree, such as the properties of vision that are fairly uniform among persons. I also intend to delve into Photoshop and other image processing software as it relates to photography.

It do not intend this to be a gear blog.  The debates between Nikon and Canon or Sony and Olympus partisans may be exciting to some but they annoy me; that is not to say that I don't have my own opinions, but I would like to keep the level of discussion here at a somewhat higher level.  I don't have the time or money to do comprehensive tests on equipment. Now if any manufacturer wishes to send me some gear for a review, I would most likely write something complimentary about their product: after all, it is polite to exchange courtesy for courtesy, and if you can't say something nice about someone, then don't say anything at all.  A truer test of any piece of gear is whether or not I'm still using it six months later, and I will most certainly let you know what I am using.

I think there is a problem with the ‘Consumer Reports’ model of purchasing gear, where the consumer pours over the various camera ratings before making the ‘correct’ purchase.  A major problem is that the people who make the ratings do not know you as an individual, there is no give-and-take or dialogue between you and them, which could help you make a better purchase for you. You might decide what is important to you, but how did you come up with that? Psychologically, this turns consumption into into a mainly passive activity: you feel wise about a purchase, but your own choices end with the purchase. But do you do your part after the purchase? Do you make a strong effort to use your new tool effectively?  Or do you blame the equipment if the results are inadequate? When I first went digital, I bought the ‘best’ but my results were bad, and I blamed the equipment; I did not make an attempt to do my part to produce good photography. An opposite, but equally bad attitude would be insisting that your photographs are the best because your camera is the best. I wrote about my early and bad attempts at digital photography the article A Camera Diary over at Rome of the West. My attitude of blaming the equipment is actually quite common these days, and have deep psychological and philosophical reasons behind them: for more details, I recommend the excellent, although somewhat dated book by Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos.

Dear readers, I hope that you won't get offended if I have very high expectations for you. The scientific aspects of photography can get very complex and mathematical — and even the artistic aspects can be very difficult, as with the excellent work of Ansel Adams and his Zone System. Please forgive me for not dumbing-down my writing for you. But I hope that I won't make things obscure either, which is all too common in modern art criticism.

My name is Mark Scott Abeln, I have been blogging for about five and a half years, and have been taking photography again seriously for a bit less amount of time.  Although I was long enamored of film photography, having many fine cameras and a darkroom, I made the transition to digital photography rather poorly.  Circumstance and motivation led me to relearn photography from scratch, and this website is part of my own continuing education in the subject.  My college degree is in physics from Caltech, and I worked for many years in the computer and industrial engineering fields, so this ought to give you some idea of where I am coming from.

I am Catholic and this has a profound effect on my preferred subject matter and approach to photography; however, if you want to know more about this — as well as higher approaches to art theory — please see Rome of the West.  I intend this to be a secular website, although there may be a Catholic flavoring at times.

My major book of photography is Catholic St. Louis: A Pictorial History, with text by prominent historian Fr. William Barnaby Faherty, S.J.; my photography can also be found in Saint Louis University: A Concise History, and on the covers of the books Tower Grove and Caring for Victor: A U.S. Army Nurse and Saddam Hussein.  Other books of my photography are planned for the future.

My writing and photography can be found on very many websites, and on posters, bulletins, and magazines.



Catholic St. Louis: A Pictorial History can be purchased at all major online booksellers, or you can click here to purchase an autographed copy: