Old picture of Arles Cathedral colonnade posted in some thead, can't find it!

I believe someone posted a very old picture of a colonnade in Arles Cathedral. The context was something about hdr being an old method. I can’t for the life of me find the post using either google or the site search. So perhaps I was hallucinating, misremember the church etc.

Anyway the reason I want to find it is that my brain thought I had that very photo in a book. Since I can’t find the post I can’t compare. Below are picture of and from my book that I bought from an shop in Hay on Wye, Wales. It’s a great book!

First the photo (there are more similar ones in the book)

Cover


Title page

If anyone can help me with this useless quest I would greatly appreciate it!

Haha ! That was quick and it was indeed the same photo! I’m sort of amazed that I recognized it because I don’t flick that book regularly even though I like it very much. Amazing photography!

I guess I couldn’t find it because all the terms I tried to search belonged to the page you linked.

I had originally seen the Baldus photo in Real/Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France.

That book does look great, I may need to pick up a copy…

Well if 226 pages of this sort of stuff floats your boat its the book to get!


Some of the photographs have a peculiar style to them almost as if drawn. It’s most evident in the photos showing the whole building against the sky. I can’t put my finger on what it is that creates this impression.

Reading up a bit on this Édouard Baldus guy and it seems I accidentally picked a book with photos by someone I didn’t but should have known about. Some links seem to suggest he more or less invented architecture photography. Makes sense I love the book!

Black and white is good at hiding the time of day but the photos in the book and ones by Édouard Baldus i find online have a very distict light. Perhaps due to multiple exposures but I also wonder if they took all the photos around the same time of day.

Before the 1870s, the negatives were only sensitive to blue light resulting in the flat featureless skies, maybe that has something to do with the style?

Felix Thiollier is also worth checking out, he shot a lot of ancient architecture in 19th century France. He published a huge book on the Forez region, there are good quality scans available: first volume of text and engravings and second volume of plates.

Nice links, downloading 1.3G to check them out :stuck_out_tongue:

For sure photographing with the equivalent of a blue filter will impact the look. I also realize that inking over and pasting parts from different exposures together will pull the photographs more in the direction of drawing, even when the individual manipulations are hard/impossible to detect.

I try to tell my architecture students (when I have them) or my colleagues to avoid pasting a digital render of a building into a complete photograph. It’s better to take both the photo and the render “apart” in software and make even use of several different photos to make a composite.

I recommend this because when the whole image is “made” the bits can form a whole. Render + photo will almost certainly make a jarring contrast between real and fake. When done well the finished multi composite image will have aspects of drawing/painting to it. Much like some of these photographs. It’s a style well suited to architecture.