Eadweard Muybridge is most well known for his stop-motion images of galloping horses. He was above all a visionary photographer who advanced the technical possibilities of the medium, laying down the foundations for future developments, including that of cinema. He did not confine himself to this though and took photographs in a wide range of genres. One that most fascinated me was the work that he did in the American West in the 1860s and 70s particularly in Yosemite. One of the problems with the early photographic techniques was that the image was the same size as the plate used and many of his photographs are of a small size. In fact he capitalised on this by producing some of the first stereoscopic images. He did push the boundaries of size however by employing a huge plate camera to take his wonderful images in Yosemite. There were some who wondered if he himself had taken the images or had they been taken by someone else or even had a mentor at his side instructing him. It has since been proved that he must have taken the images himself if, for nothing else, some were taken in such inaccessible places that no other photographic contempories could have got to. Even in this genre of photography Muybridge was an inoventor. He devloped a sky shade that enabled him to hold back the exposure of the sky to show detail in clouds and also experimented with combining two plates one exposed for the sky and the other for the foreground - the forerunner of today's HDR techology. Some of his images do have 'the same' sky however!
Pigeon Point Lighthouse
Yosemite
Wonderful reflections here.
Again a fabulous sky in this shot taken in the valley.
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