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.

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4 Comments

Route fascism… M5 M42 M6 A14 from Devon. Miss M25. Also about 10 miles less bizarrely.

    Ah – thanks, yes – we actually went out that way, so decided to come back via the M4 just for a change!

    Interestingly, the M3 is also almost exactly the same distance (or at least time, according to Google).

    Of course, it also takes about the same time to get to Cairo as to Devon… 🙂

It’s such a pity that all these sorts of scenes are cluttered up with cars!

That’s just a brief 20th/21st century phenomenon. After we got cars, but before they were able to park themselves elsewhere, they used to clutter up beautiful residential streets…

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