Sometimes a magazine article or on line event just catches you at the right moment. This happened to me over the weekend when I attended a Nature Group on-line event "Photographing the unseen world". Adrian Davies took us through a variety of topics that were of interest to me. The first of these were images that are too fast or too slow for the eye to see.
One useful part of these events for me is it makes me think again about images I have taken and prints I have viewed. My mind went back to the work of the Alinari family in 19th Century Florence. While it features people in an architectural shot they are leaning or sitting in the image. The photographic materials of the time were very slow by modern standards and the exposure time must have been really long. They considered their composition in the light of materials available.
I had considered the Alinari work in context of conflict as a Contemporary blog story. The Nature Group event made me consider how others had used these slow materials as a part of their creative intent, taking me back to an image I had seen at the same time by French photographer Charles Marville around 1858-60. He used the long exposures necessary to take an ethereal image of a waterfall, illustrating it in a manner slower than the eye can see.