Celebrating the 156th anniversary of Roger Fenton's "September Clouds, 1856"

The Bloggist tips his hat to Mr Roger Fenton who, in 1856, photographed clouds and landscape on the same negative. In the mid-19th Century it required a relatively long exposure to achieve detail in a landscape but this would result in a blank white sky as the sky was so much brighter than the land. Photographers who wished to include detail in the sky in landscape photographs would make one exposure for the landscape and, on a new plate, another for the sky. When printing out, the two negative images would be combined in a positive print. Mr Fenton seems to have aimed to combine both aspects of a landscape on one negative, a novel approach for the period.

The Bloggist has found two images with the title “September Clouds” and dated 1856. One in The Royal Photographic Society collection housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1410698/september-clouds-photograph-fenton-roger/), and another in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in New York, (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/282040). In homage to these images the Bloggist publishes four of his own cloud photographs.