The early days of bird photography

I was recently given this little book by my friends Viv & David.  It is Birds in the Garden: Studies with a Camera, written by Granville Sharpe and published in 1902.

Much of the book is a description of the birds and the way they live but what interested me most was the technique of taking the photos.  The camera used was "an ordinary half-plate camera" with "a good long-focus lens".  The camera was wrapped in several layers of material to reduce the noise of the focal plane shutter.  The long pneumatic shutter release went into the house through the open window where the photographer was hiding behind a blind.  The photogenic perch for the bird was fixed to the back of a chair and the food to attract the bird was placed on a box on the seat of the chair.  Because the photos were monochrome a white back ground was positioned so the bird would stand out.  All that remained was for the photographer to wait until the bird was sitting still on the perch and then to trigger the shutter.  No details are given of shutter speed but it must have been low - if the bird moved because of the sound of the shutter then the photo would be blurred.  And of course the camera could only take one picture before the photographer had to come out, unwrap the camera, and change the plate.  Here is the set up.

The birds chosen for inclusion in the book were blue tit, great tit, coal tit, marsh tit, spotted flycatcher, pied flycatcher, robin, chaffinch and willow wren (willow warbler), at least four of which certainly wouldn't be in the top nine these days. The author does concede that pied flycatchers were not common.  I suspect he chose these nine birds because they were the ones he had good photos of.  The book contains over 100 photographs and eight photogravures.  I had to look it up but Wikipedia says photogravure is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph.  The photogravures are certainly better quality illustrations.

This fascinating book offers an interesting comparison to the way we take photos of garden bird these days, with auto focus, automatic exposure control and up to 10 frames per second.  Some things, though, are much the same after more than 100 years.