Cuttlefish and photography

What have cuttlefish got to do with photography, you may ask. In this digital age, fewer and fewer people will know much about film processing and the various techniques you can apply to create manually a dramatic effect in an image. Sepia toning was/is one of those techniques.

Sepia-toned fishing boats, Dunwich Beach

The term ‘sepia’ comes from the name of an artists’ pigment made from the sepia cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis found in the English Channel. Although sepia toning is done chemically to convert the metallic silver in the photographic print to a sulfide compound, which gives it that “old-fashioned” hue but protects the photograph from environmental pollutants such as atmospheric sulfur compounds.

There are three types of sepia toner in modern use: Sodium sulfide toners, the traditional ‘rotten egg’ toner; thiourea (or ‘thiocarbamide’) toners, these are odourless and the tone can be varied according to the chemical mixture; Polysulfide or ‘direct’ toners, which avoid a bleaching stage.

A print is first soaked in potassium ferricyanide bleach to re-convert the metallic silver to silver halide. It is then washed to remove excess potassium ferricyanide then finally immersed in a bath of toner, which converts the silver halides to silver sulfide. Incomplete bleaching creates a multi-toned image with sepia highlights and grey midtones and shadows. This is called split toning. The untoned silver in the print can be treated with a different toner, such as gold or selenium.

Sepia-toned images are associated with period photography of the 1800s. Modern photographers and cinematographers exploit the “old-time-feel” of sepia toning to good, if not a little cliched, effect to evoke nostalgia.

Today, sepia toning is more of an aesthetic choice than an environmental protection racket and with a little action in Photoshop or almost any other image editor you save a cuttlefish from the inky writing on the seawall.

Imaging Storm Photography

Imaging Storm Photography is my latest science blogging project. I created the site wayback when as a personal photo gallery. I had used it until recently instead of Flickr and Picasa as a showcase for the photographs I took at various village and other events. However, those now have their own space on Flickr, so ImagingStorm.co.uk (named after a friend’s daughter, Imogen Storm) was lying idle, so I decided it was time to rebuild.

I installed WordPress and then messed around with various themes until I found the excellent Sliding Door, which does the neat sliding photos effect you see above. Needless to say, I swapped out the default sliding images for a few of my own.

From left to right:

A dusky scene at the Milton Country Park north of Cambridge, as a family we’ve spent many a happy hour playing, cycling, walking and photographing this ex-gravel pit.

Bunsen, our family black and white short-hair former cat in an unusual fast-moving action shot.

One of the giant species of Papaver orientale (poppy) that grow in our front garden and to which I am drawn each summer with a camera in hand.

York Railway Museum silhouetted steam wheels/machinery stuff. Ever since childhood I’ve found this museum to be fascinating and I’m certainly no trainspotter, in any sense of the word.

The night view from our room at the Belfast Hilton on a visit to the chemistry department at Queen’s University Belfast.

Aldeburgh/Slaughden beacon – an indicator of why tide and wave power might be the future for renewable energy, given that there used to be a village here rather than a shingle beach.

Baltic Flour Mills and Newcastle Eye over the River Tyne. The Mills are an art gallery, the Eye is very much testament to the fusion of art and engineering.

As I was uploading the new images it suddenly struck me that the new photo blog could do with a stronger theme than it just being my random photos of everything and anything, and so I intend to tie in a scientific theme with each photo I post. I’ve got almost 50 gigabytes of digital images and that does not include traditional negatives yet to be scanned of which there are several thousand dating back two decades. I’m fairly confident I can post at least a weekly item with a scientific connection. Watch this space.

Next week carbon dioxide…