S F Spira
Biographic Data
| ID | 7246641 |
|---|---|
| NAME | S F Spira |
| GIVEN NAMES | S F |
| FAMILY NAME | Spira |
| SIGNATURE | SPIRA S F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Regent's University London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Notes & Queries
Daguerreian saloon
Leaves from a journal; elevated prose
Like many of his eminent contemporaries, Lord Patrick Robertson (1794 – 1855) sat in 181:4 for a portrait,1 to be produced by the then only recently introduced calotype process (figure 1). The practitioners of this process in Scotland were the well-known portrait painter David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, whose elder brother, Dr John Adamson, had been introduced to it by Sir David Brewster. The partnership of Hill and Adamson, formed in 1843…
Diamond miners
Sheet music and photography II: My first photograph
Calvert and Shakespeare
Sheet music and photography III: H. S. Perkins compositions
Russian prisoners
Sheet Music and Photography I: The Forsaken One
Panoramic photographs as nineteenth century book illustrations
The earliest panoramic photograph exposed on a single plate is attributed to Friedrich von Martens, a German, who resided in France in the 1840s. The 4.7 x 15 inch curved daguerreotype was produced in a camera equipped with a lens which pivoted over an angle of about 150°.1 Some dealers in ‘philosophical instruments’ included in their offers of cameras, from the mid 1840s through the 1850s, ‘Traversing’ cameras.2 These they described as providing…
A Daguerreotypist's self-portrait
Taking one's own picture with a daguerreotype or other early camera was by no means simple. The subject/photographer had to devise a means of opening the ‘shutter’, keeping it open for the required exposure period (which could have been up to several minutes), and then closing it
Ford's Daguerrean Gallery
Union Mutual Life Insurance Company Daguerreotype
Turn-of-the-century enlarging apparatus
When, in the early 1890s, the London Stereoscopic Company (whose name reflected the company's original specialization in stereoscopic cards and viewers) introduced its 'Binocular' Hand Camera, it headlined the description of the camera with the claim: 'Weighs, when loaded with 12 plates or 30 films, 19 oz. only, but gives a picture measuring 7 × 5 inches'
Polka Tot
An unconventional plate-changing system
Starting well before the introduction of roll film, and continuing for over a decade after this medium became readily available, manufacturers of dry-plate cameras worked on simplifying the plate-changing procedures. In the search for better methods, they came up with a variety of unusual designs,1 including that of the Quad Camera.2 The 1896 Montgomery Ward & Co., Chicago, photography catalogue3 describes the Quad as ‘a compact, inexpensive came…
Gentleman of the press
Claudet's Diamond
The Powell Camera
The deceptive angle graphic
Since the first ‘detective camera’ was introduced in the early 1880s, manufacturers have sought ways of designing cameras to look like anything but cameras. Tool boxes, satchels, watches, books, canes, hats, binoculars, all served as disguises. Another approach was that employed by the circular Stirn, Gray and similar ‘vest’ cameras, which would ‘shoot’ through the photographer's vest buttonhole
The Kennedy camera
A mong the variety of plate-changing mechanisms employed in late 19th- and early 20th-century cameras, one of the oddest and probably the slowest to operate is that used in an unnamed camera, made by J. H. Kennedy, St Paul, Minnesota
Daguerreotypes for decoration
Photorebus
Abducted
Early camera catalogue
During the first decade following the introduction of the Giroux camera, photographic products were generally manufactured on a very small scale and, in many cases, only on special order. As a result, very few catalogues with descriptions and prices of such products were printed, and even those that were employed small linecuts with minimal details and sketchy descriptions of the items. Despite these shortcomings, the few catalogues which feature…
No prominent works on this page.
Daguerreotypes as a selling tool
Photographica on Postage Stamps
Considering the impact photography has had on our culture, on science and on our everyday lives, the subject has long been treated as stepchild by the post offices of the world; however, this very fact makes assembly of the collection of photography-related stamps a relatively simple task
The secret eye
The authors of this lavishly illustrated book have brought imppeccable credentials to their task, and have created a scholarly and entertaining work on what must surely be one of the most fascinating subjects in thc history of photography. The book is concerned with cameras either very small, so that they could be hidden during picture taking, or else disguised in various ways, pretending to be other objects of use, sometimes taking photographs i…
Graves and Graven Images
The custom of placing images of the deceased in the immediate vicinity of their burial place goes back thousands of years. It is, therefore, not surprising that shortly after the invention of photography, an enterprising manufacturer started a business for the specific purpose of providing ‘Monumental Daguerreotype Cases’
Photographically Illustrated Books
The spirograph: The ‘disc’ motion-picture viewer and projector
In the early part of this century, two enterprising individuals, Charles Urban and Henry W. Joy, decided to improve on the system of viewing and projecting motion-pictures which, at the time, had been in existence for only a few short years. Charles Urban, already well known in the then infant motion picture industry for his Bioscope projector, registered the trademark ‘SPIROGRAPH’ in England on 7th August 1909, two-and-a-half years before he obt…
Horn & Thornthwaite Camera
The Spirograph
Photograph Marriage Certificates
In 1868, H. M. Crider of York, Pennsylvania had an idea: to make the traditional marriage certificate into ornate broadsides which accepted photographs of the bride and groom and, on some versions, of the officiating priest as well. Crider registered his designs and mailed his offer, together with a self-addressed reply envelope, to ministers in the eastern part of the United States. For only $3.45, Crider would send ‘a sample package, containing…
Carroll's camera
Ottewill's Registered Double Folding Camera was introduced in 1853. A camera of this type was purchased in 1856 by Lewis Carroll, who described it in Hiawatha's Photographing, his parody of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. Carroll completed the poem on 13th November 1857. The poem became more widely known when it was included in Carroll's Phantasmagoria and Other Poems 1,2
The Jumelle de Nicour Camera
Many books on the history of photographic cameras refer to the Jumelle de Nicour as one of the earliest ‘detective’ cameras1,2 and perhaps the first intentionally disguised design3, but it is far more likely that the inventor decided on his camera's unconventional configuration for purely practical reasons. The Jumelle de Nicour was the first of many cameras which looked like a pair of binoculars4 (jumelle is, indeed, the French term for binocula…
Gentleman of the press
Claudet's Diamond
The Powell Camera
The deceptive angle graphic
Since the first ‘detective camera’ was introduced in the early 1880s, manufacturers have sought ways of designing cameras to look like anything but cameras. Tool boxes, satchels, watches, books, canes, hats, binoculars, all served as disguises. Another approach was that employed by the circular Stirn, Gray and similar ‘vest’ cameras, which would ‘shoot’ through the photographer's vest buttonhole
The Kennedy camera
A mong the variety of plate-changing mechanisms employed in late 19th- and early 20th-century cameras, one of the oddest and probably the slowest to operate is that used in an unnamed camera, made by J. H. Kennedy, St Paul, Minnesota
Daguerreotypes for decoration
Photorebus
Abducted
Early camera catalogue
During the first decade following the introduction of the Giroux camera, photographic products were generally manufactured on a very small scale and, in many cases, only on special order. As a result, very few catalogues with descriptions and prices of such products were printed, and even those that were employed small linecuts with minimal details and sketchy descriptions of the items. Despite these shortcomings, the few catalogues which feature…
An unconventional plate-changing system
Starting well before the introduction of roll film, and continuing for over a decade after this medium became readily available, manufacturers of dry-plate cameras worked on simplifying the plate-changing procedures. In the search for better methods, they came up with a variety of unusual designs,1 including that of the Quad Camera.2 The 1896 Montgomery Ward & Co., Chicago, photography catalogue3 describes the Quad as ‘a compact, inexpensive came…
Turn-of-the-century enlarging apparatus
When, in the early 1890s, the London Stereoscopic Company (whose name reflected the company's original specialization in stereoscopic cards and viewers) introduced its 'Binocular' Hand Camera, it headlined the description of the camera with the claim: 'Weighs, when loaded with 12 plates or 30 films, 19 oz. only, but gives a picture measuring 7 × 5 inches'
Polka Tot
A Daguerreotypist's self-portrait
Taking one's own picture with a daguerreotype or other early camera was by no means simple. The subject/photographer had to devise a means of opening the ‘shutter’, keeping it open for the required exposure period (which could have been up to several minutes), and then closing it
Ford's Daguerrean Gallery
Art (36 works) · Visual arts (32 works) · Art history (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (14 works) · Photography (10 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (5 works) · Physics (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Business (3 works)