"The Negative" reading response

I thought they had just forgotten to quote De la Roche and the author got all prose-y on me. Also I’m still not totally thrilled he (or is it a she? I don’t actually know) is writing in the first person, but I will live, I suppose. It feels too chummy, and I don’t want to be friends with my textbook. It just feels odd.

Hey it’s Boyle! That guy’s important in (non-art related) science!

It makes me sad that none of the prints from Davy are still around. Also shouldn't the textbook know definitively whether or not they exist, or at the very least if it is unknown?

Poor Talbot, doing all the work and getting way less credit than he deserves. It’s pretty crazy how he came up with that process though.

Wait so is guncotton explosive? I mean I imagine it is but the author never explicitly states that, he just says it’s “ironic” how guncotton is used to treat explosives.

Wow Archer had it even worse off than Talbot, he’s like the Tesla of photography (in that he ended up poor and in hardship).

Adding contrast to a darkroom photo is a good thing to know. I kind of knew how to do it before, but I never really was sure of exactly why it worked.

I think I can develop my own prints, so that info is (mostly) irrelevant. And always do high resolution when scanning. You can always dumb down the image, but you can’t ever raise the quality.

Hey Cliché-verre is what we’re doing in class!

This gets super technical towards the end, that was a rough read.