This week’s post is a heads up about an exciting event happening later this week. It comes with rather short notice, for which we apologise, but we are thrilled to be involved in the Borough’s Somme commemorations, happening on this coming Friday, 1st July. We do hope that some of our local followers will be able to…
Here at the Past on Glass project we’ve become accustomed to handling glass plate negatives and being enthralled by the images we’ve retrieved from them, but we sometimes wish we could visit the Knights-Whittome Studio and see for ourselves how it was done. A few tantalising images give us some small clues about the studio set…
A little bit of fun for a windswept Tuesday afternoon… 🙂 1894: Excerpt from the notebook ‘Secrets of Photography’ by David Knights-Whittome. 2015 : Physiognomy for the 21st Century
Given the dates that David Knights-Whittome was running his business in Sutton (c.1905-1917), it is not surprising that we are finding a huge number of the glass plates from the basement of his shop are of soldiers, airman, naval personnel and nurses. A number of these military portraits were researched by Archives staff prior to the start of this project, in preparation for…
It’s easy to think of photographic retouching as a modern day phenomenon, but glass plate photographers working in the 19th and early 20th centuries were also masters of retouching – they used an array of tools to enhance, alter, add shadow and definition and generally idealise or improve their subjects – and moreover, this practice was…
One of the most interesting aspects of the Past on Glass project is tracking down and researching some of the many thousands of sitters depicted in the glass plates. We assume that most were local characters, from Sutton or Epsom, but it’s proving hard to find a large number of matches in the census records…
Our first post from a project volunteer comes from Pamela Jane Wheeler, a local photographer who has had experience in working with the Knights-Whittome collection as part of her final degree project as outlined below. Pamela has been generous in offering her time alongside her day job and her skills are proving really useful to the…
