Vittorio Sella

[Hans Berkhout]

Always wondered how he gets his clouds, considering the spectral sensitivity of wet plate collodion. Anybody?

[Robert Hughes]

Always wondered how he gets his clouds,

How do you get anything? Fex Ex, of course!

[Brian Stein]

standard approach IIRC was to take two exposures, one for clouds one not and print from double negative

[marduk]

There was a book of Sella's images published some years ago, I bought a copy of it for my now-wife. I'm sure glad she married me, I got to keep the book

He-he, my friend brought this book from Kathmandu, Nepal. I'm surely gonna browse the bookshops there for it on my next visit :-)

[Drew Wiley]

Hans - in some cases the clouds were dubbed in from another negative, which was
a frequent trick of the era. Sella also liked a sense of scale in his shots,
so often incorporated human figures somewhere in the scene. There's a compelling panorama of the peaks of the Karakorum with the Baltoro Glacier and several roped climbers in the middle distance. This image was taken verbatim for almost a century until someone examined the original negative, which had no climbers in it at all. Sella had at his disposal a scaled shot of climbers against a relatively blank white snow background, which he had taken long before in the Alps for just such a situation. He blended the scene as seamlessly as Uelsman could have. Against the grand landscape, everything looks believable. But by real scientific parameters, the climbers off in the distance would have to have been at least twenty feet tall apiece!

[Nathan Potter]

Impressive for the time! Later, at around the 1920s, Byron Harmon did some similar work in the Canadian rockies but with film. Some of our Canadian friends should be familiar with his work, done prior to the Icefields Parkway, I believe, and much by pack horse. I think it's his grand daughter who has a gallery at the back of one of the arcades in Banff and shows some of his images there. There was a marvelous soft, specialty icecream shop next door (2005 or so) so the gallery sticks in my mind. Well, some of the images stick in my mind also.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Drew Wiley]

I should have added that when Sella was doing his work on the Baltoro with that big
camera, their party was being chased by Gurkha soldiers just a few days behind them. And we think we've got things rough every time the wind shakes a 4X5 exposure. What is ironic, however, is that no one took him to task for sandwich printing double negatives, but did call him unethical for using a telephoto lens to
create "unreal" views, the famous shot of Mustagh Tower being the most infamous
of them.

[Hans Berkhout]

Tx Brian, Drew, for your informative answers.