Wet plate aka gun cotton photography Wet plate photography was not easy.  The wet-plate collodion process used between the 1850s and 1880s uses a solution of gun-cotton in ether and alcohol and requires the entire photographic process including coating the...

Fox Talbot at dawn The recent exhibition Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph at the Science Museum in London which ended on September 11th 2016 was described as ‘magical to behold’ by  Time Out  and ‘ground-breaking’ by The Times.  I found it extremely...

Inspiration When a friend of mine purchased a Sony RX1  in 2016 I thought it was way to much to spend on a compact camera.  At £2,700 this was no trivial purchase and so I looked closely at cheaper options:...

Why Timeless? A black white image with that timeless quality Black and white images often possess a timeless quality that is more difficult to achieve with colour images. This is largely because colour provides more visual clues as to when...

Enough to Convert a Pianist When a photograph is converted to mono and the colour removed, what remains is tone. Tone is in fact one of the reasons black and white photography has continued to be popular after the advent...

We have had colour photography since the 1930s and the invention of Kodachrome, though it took until the 1970s for it become the norm.  So why has black and white photography persisted? Perhaps the most obvious difference between colour and...