Daily Archives:April 6th, 2013

Accentuate the negative

On the way home from Devon, to avoid a nasty M4 traffic build-up near Swindon, we stopped off at Lacock, a small Wiltshire village owned almost entirely (and beautifully preserved) by the National Trust.

Lacock, Wiltshire

On the sunny afternoon after a bank holiday, it was a very peaceful spot, and a delightful antidote to the M4. (Or to Swindon).

Lacock is used as a location for many films – we recognised several bits of Meryton from the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, for example. But it also has an important place in photographic history, because a window at Lacock Abbey was the image Henry Fox Talbot captured in the first known photographic negative.

As we drove home, I couldn’t help wondering what Henry F T would have made of Glenn Morse’s very cool project to build a photographic enlarger. This is no ordinary enlarger, though – the negatives are their own light source, because they’re displayed on his iPad screen.

The call of the wild

East Anglia seems rather tame today. This was the view, a few yards outside our door, last weekend.

View from Bull Point

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser