TALBOT8693

[printed notepaper: 1 Hillside Crescent, Edinburgh

24 April 1863

Dear Sir,

Yours of today has arrived with the return box, & more important, your new & almost instantaneous engraving of Mount Gaujara, on the small steel plate. ¹

You have really made a very pretty & effective little thing of it, and, even if circumstances were to prevent you doing anything more, this one will go a long way in controlling the Stationery Office print, because 1^st, it shows the reality of that strange hand & fore-finger of rock towards the right hand, [illustration], and 2^nd, it shows the non-reality of a line of apparent white stones in the Stationery Office’s view, under the pointed summit of the high mountain [illustration]

Now these white spots being arranged in a row parallel with the lay of the ground at the plan, had quite deceived me, when looking at a print form one of the negatives only: for I conceived [sic] that they must be real, must be remarkable & that I ought to have visited them when living on the top of the mountain only a few hundred yards off.

Yet they are after all, merely accidental spots of microscopic dust on the original negative plate.

You say most truly that your engraving will give the minutæ of a photograph; for I have been examining the Strasburg Cathedral, as well as the M^t Guajara, with a compound microscope, and had my opinion of them greatly raised. Indeed when appreciating the extraordinary minuteness of the forms thus rendered, a want of depth or force in the dark parts is overlooked, or should be, because there is no mechanical plan I suppose by which strong black can be printed, without showing the machinery of its production on a larger scale than the natural forms which you reproduce from the photograph.

The parts however of the Strasburg Cathedral which I liked most, were those in the shade; for there, there was much “half-tint” involvable for making a picture.

Your new M^t. Guajara has a most precious tinge, faint but valuable, of this half tint, over the right-hand part of the hill.

If there could have been rather more of that half-tint: say the right-hand of the depth of the left-hand is, & the left-hand about twice as strong, the thing would be a pictorial, as well as a scientific gem. But perhaps all this would require that my photographing in Teneriffe should have been of a better order.

Yours very truly
C. Piazzi Smyth