﻿PHOTOGRAPHING ON WOOD FOR ENGRAVING 



By THi )M \S W. SMILLIE 



Honorary Custodian, Section of Photography, United States National 



Museum. 



Up to about the year [868, pictures which were to be engraved 

 on wood had to be transferred by hand to the block in a reversed 

 position, and as this work was laborious, the artist who made the 

 original picture generally left the transferring of it to the block, 



to be done by a mere copyist, who was very likely to take a fine 

 spirited original and make a characterless copy of it, and in scientific 

 work often reproducing the subject with such inaccuracy that the 

 illustration when completed was perfectly useless. This led to the 

 suggestion that the photographer should take the place of the copy- 

 ist, and various photographic methods were tried, beginning with the 

 carbon transfer which made a beautiful copy in the desired reversed 

 position, but very misleading to the engraver on account of the 

 thickness of the film, then the albumen-silver method which mad.' 

 the wood pithy, next the bromo-gelatine which was with a minumum 

 amount of gelatin fairly successful, but which with the necessary 

 amount of washing caused large blocks to swell and crack. 



At this time acting upon a suggestion in one of the journals that 

 collodion transfers might be used on wood, I tried it, but found that 

 as used at that time it would not do. 



I used the process however as a basis for experiment and finally 

 by adopting the alkaline silver bath which has little solvent action 

 on the haloides on the collodion surface, making a thick collodion 

 with very little iodide and bromide, so as to prevent the lighter 

 shadows and middle tones from blocking up, thus enabling me to 

 give short exposures and force the development, and in fact doing 

 everything to produce a picture on the surface of the film so that no 

 pyroxylin should intervene between the picture and the block (other- 

 wise the picture would be carried away when the film was dis- 

 solved). I finally perfected the process and produced a picture of 

 exquisite delicacy, having no more body than a pencil drawing upon 

 the wood. This is the process which has been in use in the Smith- 

 sonian Institution since 1869. 



For fifteen or twenty years I prepared nearly all of the illustrations 

 for the Smithsonian Institution and its bureaus in this way, and also 



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