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February 27, 1880.] THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. 103 otes. The Photographic Club, we are glad to hear, already numbers sixty members. Among those who are fully alive to the importance of carbon printing is the Queen. Her Majesty has expressed a wish to Mr. Jabez Hughes, of Ryde, that all photo graphs supplied to her may be printed in permanent pig ments. The Bristol and West of England Amateur Photographic Association are using every endeavour to make their “ International Exhibition,” to be held next winter, a success. Gold medals and silver medals will be for com petition, and already many British and foreign applica tions have been received from intending exhibitors. The Exhibition is to be held in the galleries of the Academy of Arts, Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol. At the commencement of last year the Photographic Society of Vienna published a list of prizes to be awarded in competition for various achievements in photography. The list will be found in the number of the Photographic News for the 4th April, 1879. It was divided into two competitions: in the first, out of the Voigtliinder fund there were offered three gold and three silver medals for various subjects, as well as gold, silver, and bronze medals for papers published in the Society’s Journal; in the second, out of the special piize fund of the Society, were offered three gold and five silver medals for similar objects. In all, therefore, the prizes amounted to fourteen fixed and an uncertain number of general medals, for all of which (with the exception of two gold medals in the Voigtliinder list) the works in competition were to be sent in by the 1st October, 1879. Up to that date, however, for all these various prizes only one work had been sent in for competition, and that one came from Australia. Nothing daunted, however, by this apparent fiasco, the Executive Council of the Society have determined to re-issue the prize list, with certain alterations in minor details, which have not yet been settled. The ultimate dates for the reception of works in competition will also be deferred to some time, not yet fixed, in the present year. Dr. Huggins’ research on star photography is, after all, only carrying out the second line of the nursery rhyme, “ How I wonder what you are.” If anything will tell us what the stars are made of, the results likely to come of his observations will do so. Mr. Dallmeyer summed up the matter very happily the other night, when he said, “ The interest of these photographs and diagrams to me is, that Dr. Huggins appears to indicate the ques tion, what is the age of our sun as compared with other suns, or stars, as we usually call them. Thus our sun is probably getting old, while Ursa Majoris is still young, and Arcturus all but worn out. Probably, by extending his researches, he may find—as he has done in the worlds in being, or beginning to be—suns which are ceasing to be.” The report of the Astronomer-Royal shows plainly enough that photographers must have had rather a bad time of it lately. “ Neither sun nor stars were visible for eleven days, during which period the clock times were carried on entirely by the preceding rate of the clock. The accumulated error at the end of this time did not exceed 0'3 second. After a fine autumn the weather in the past winter and spring has been remarkably bad.” We hardly wanted an Astronomer-Royal to tell us that. Photography seems to be making headway at Greenwich, for the Astronomer-Royal further remarks that during the year spectroscopic observations have been almost entirely suspended, in order that the reductions of accumulated photographic observations might proceed more rapidly. Photographs of the sun were taken on 150 days, and 228 of these photographs have been selected for preservation. The photographs show a complete absence of spots on 121 days out of the 150 on which it was possible to secure an image of the sun. Our readers will wonder, we are sure, how it is possible to take solar photographs at all in a murky atmosphere like that at Greenwich. We alluded last week to the first camera photograph taken in this country at New. But we must go back ten years before, to May, 1816, for an account of Nicephore Niepce’s first image secured in the camera, not, however, by the aid of bitumen of Judea, but with silver salts Whether he used chloride we do not know, but as silver, is alluded to in his letters as well as the destructive action of nitric acid, we may take this for granted. The photo graph he describes in a letter to his brother, then resident in England ; it represented a barn and yard at the back of his residence. Here is the description of it in Nicephore Niepce’s own words : “ The pigeon-house is reversed on the picture, the barn—or rather the roof of the barn—being to the left instead of to the right. The white mass which you perceive to the right of the pigeon-house, and which appears some what confused, is the reflection upon the paper of the pear tree. which is some distance further off; and the black spot near the summit is an opening between the branches of the trees. The shadow on the right indicates the roof of the bakehouse, which appears somewhat lower than it ought to be, because the cameras were placed about five feet above the floor. Finally, those little white lines marked above the roof of the barn are the reflection on the sensitive material of the branches of some trees in the orchard.” Lights and shadows were therefore reversed in Niepce’s first camera photograph. Photographers do not always employ patent plate now- a-days, and it is worth while knowing, therefore, how to tell if a bit of crown glass is tolerably well polished. If taken into the glass room where the roof presents plenty of straight lines, and held in a horizontal manner, the surface should reflect these straight lines without any ten dency to serpentine or zig-zag.