Abstract
THE Royal Photographic Society's annual exhibition at the Gallery of the Royal Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street, Haymarket, is well worth a visit by anyone interested in photography and its applications before it closes on October 4. Besides an excellent collection of works that are notable for their pictorial quality, and that will be examined by technicians as illustrations of the possibilities of the processes that they represent, there is a larger than usual number of colour transparencies, and also exhibits that are of specially scientific interest. The colour transparencies are chiefly autochromes, but there are many on the new Paget plate and a few “Dufays,” both of which latter will quite well bear comparison with the autochromes for the quality of their colour and detail. In the scientific section, Lt.-Col. J. W. Gifford shows a large number of original photographs of spectra of the metals taken with a quartz optical train of large aperture. Mr. G. Reboul shows that cuprous chloride, produced by exposing a polished copper plate to chlorine gas, will furnish photographs by treatment somewhat similar to that employed in the production of daguerreotypes. The insecurity of intaglio plate printing for monetary documents is again demonstrated by Mr. A. E. Bawtree in his copies of stamps, the genuine stamp and the forgeries being indistinguishable. The photo-micrographic section is particularly strong. The method of discovering a difference in the colloids present in jams, and of detecting various adulterations, is excellently shown in a series of low-power photo-micrographs by Mr. E. Marriage. Of other series, the “Histology of the Optic Nerve of Sheep,” by Mr. J. T. Holder; the “Corpuscular Elements of Human Blood,” by Dr. D. H. Hutchin-son; and Mr. J. M. Offord's “Diatoms under High Power,” deserve special notice. There is a fine collection of radiographs by Dr. Bela Alexander, Dr. G. H. Rodman, Dr. Gilbert Scott, Dr. Robert Knox, and Dr. Thurstan Holland, some taken in a small fraction of a second. In this direction the most novel work is by M. Pierre Goby, who by the use of ultra-soft rays secures quite full details in the most delicate transparent membranes, such as insects' wings, at the same time as showing the internal structure of the insect. But more wonderful are his micro-radiographs, made by using the fine pencil of Röntgen rays that passes through a small hole in a lead screen. The detail in parts of small vertebrates only a fraction of an inch in length, is so well reproduced that a fifteen or seventeen times enlargement would be considered excellently sharp for a direct radiograph. M. Goby applies his method to foraminifera and other minute objects with similar success. Among the other exhibits there are a process with examples of a method of producing colour transparencies by the absorption of dyes in fish-glue, by Mr. Bawtree, and good collections of natural history photographs, lantern slides, and stereoscopic transparencies.
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Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society . Nature 92, 18 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/092018b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/092018b0