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View Full Version : "Manual of Photography" -- Freebie Optics Chapters


Jeff Genung
16-Nov-2005, 15:11
I have been looking for a book that gives a basic background of photography as a science and not as an art, and found one of the best books was published in 1868 by Mathew Carey Lea, called "a Manual of Photography". It is still available as a hardcover for a fair piece of change.

What I have done is re-publish the book, re-edit and completely re-Typeset the book for readability, and re-draw the engravings in the book for legibility. Not only as a book describing collodion and both wet and dry plate photography, this is a very good book to explore the use of a large format camera and photography as a science, and should not be thought of as a "dated" book at all.

I am offering the chapters 5-10 on optics as a free download, as I have found them to be eminently worthwhile.

Freebie chapters 5-10 on optics (http://www.lulu.com/content/185717)
Dean Tomasula
16-Nov-2005, 15:32
Are you sure no one owns the copyright on this book and that it is in the public domain?
Jeff Genung
16-Nov-2005, 15:34
100%
Witold Grabiec
16-Nov-2005, 15:44
Thanks Jeff, I'm already enjoying the read.

It's always been amazing to me how well the OLD books, on any subject, were written and published.
Ed Richards
16-Nov-2005, 19:03
Great work! Basically any book prior to the early 1920s is in the public domain. Republishing them is a public service. I do it on my WWW site, but only for boring things like public health law.:-)
Jason Greenberg Motamedi
16-Nov-2005, 21:42
The whole book is also available on the web:

www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AEL5141.0001.001 (http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AEL5141.0001.001)
Jeff Genung
18-Nov-2005, 18:35
The web version is not 100% complete, and very difficult to print out a page at a time. University of Michigan Press also offers a $40 version that is just a straight Xerox of the book in hardcover (on Amazon). I have used an original copy, re-typeset the entire book and re-drawn 81 of 84 engravings original to the book. Then put it into a paperback at a reasonable cost. It makes for a much more readable volume.