Capturing the Light by Roger Watson book review

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I wanted to know about photography and the discovery thereof.

Fixing light to film, the perfect medium for programming and deceit.

The Camera Obscura, the Camera Lucida, and tools used to control our fucked up reality.

How were the “masters” able to achieve perfect scales and perspectives?

My original thesis:

Capturing the light was given to us by the fallen angels. A super long game of death and destruction by illuninated secret societies, the goddamn bugs, and sick congregations that worship lies.

And wouldn’t you know, after reading this book, I find the following:

Nobody knows how Daguerre manifested his famous Daguerreotype.

“How and why Daguerre came to use the chemicals and materials that he did is certainly unique in the history of photographic experimentation, for the path he followed appears to have been not just the path less travelled but a path that he alone pursued.”

Immediately following his eureka moment, Daguerre’s studio burned to the ground and his notes allegedly destroyed.

Enter a new disgusting “art”. One that provides a reflection of our fallen state. Photography.

The truth is this, Daguerre summoned The Fallen Angels to assist him in creating photography, epic magick direct from the demon angel Satan.

Visual deception. A reflection of light frozen in TIME.

A prison for us all.

This book, written by Limey English duo, makes a fuss about Talbot, Daguerre, and others who attempted to claim primacy of invention, and the useless lie called a patent.

There’s some kind of French vs British thing going on in this story. When, in fact, the book plainly illustrates TOTAL LIZARD DOMINATION of photography from the very outset.

“This seems an odd coincidence: the French bill had been sent to King Louis-Philippe for his signature on the 1 August and the English patent was sent to Queen Victoria for her signature just one day later.”

A nice round story about the creation of photography and CAPTURE of LIGHT.

Forever imprisoned on dark negatives. Deception captured on film.

Pray for it all to end.

Some of my highlights:

Capturing the Light by Roger Watson

Book last read: 2023-06-29 05:51:19
Percentage read: 100%

Chapter 6: Prologue: My First Daguerreotype
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Chapter progress: 3.26%
Highlight: the time was not distant, when one might look in a mirror, and leave his image sticking there.

Chapter 7: One: The Locked Treasure Room
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Chapter progress: 4.89%
Highlight: This new age of scientific enquiry, based on experimental verification, was fostered by the work of the Royal Society in London, which took as its motto ‘Nullius in verba’ – effectively meaning, ‘Take nobody’s word for it’.

Notes: face mask covid death science.

Chapter 8: Two: Shadowgrams
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Chapter progress: 5.54%
Highlight: The fourteen or so members of this small provincial society began meeting monthly in the late 1750s on the first Monday nearest to the full moon as a matter of practicality.

Chapter 8: Two: Shadowgrams
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Chapter progress: 5.86%
Highlight: But in the philanthropic tradition of the Lunar Men he had a keen social conscience and a sense of the responsibility that his family wealth brought him and channelled his failing energies into education and moral improvement.
Notes: Secret society barf bag science.

Chapter 8: Two: Shadowgrams
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Chapter progress: 7.17%
Highlight: yet in preparing his paper with the magical silver nitrate (known as lunar caustic by the ancient alchemists who believed that silver was associated with the moon), he had laid down the important germ

Chapter 9: Three: The Box of Wonders
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Chapter progress: 8.14%
Highlight: with France on the brink of bankruptcy and martial law declared in Paris,
Notes: Oh no.

Chapter 11: Five: The Panorama
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Chapter progress: 13.68%
Highlight: Grand Cabinet of Optical and Magnetic Effects

Chapter 13: Seven: More Beautiful than Nature
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Chapter progress: 19.54%
Highlight: But has it not always been the case that much of scientific innovation and greatness springs from an element of madness or obsession somewhere along the line?

Chapter 13: Seven: More Beautiful than Nature
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Chapter progress: 19.87%
Highlight: William Hooper’s Rational Recreations, a collection of ‘Electrical and Magnetical Experiments’ published in the late eighteenth century,

Chapter 14: Eight: Lacock Abbey
Annotation
Chapter progress: 20.85%
Highlight: no need to pursue any occupation other than that of gentleman.
Notes: Create camera.

Chapter 14: Eight: Lacock Abbey
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Chapter progress: 21.5%
Highlight: now realized that the current system was unsustainable.

Chapter 15: Nine: Seeking the Impossible
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Chapter progress: 22.8%
Highlight: French aristocrat, landowner and amateur scientist,
Notes: Covid enforcer.

Chapter 15: Nine: Seeking the Impossible
Annotation
Chapter progress: 23.13%
Highlight: After all, he lived in an age when scientific enquiry was flourishing and competition was inevitable.
Notes: Lizards only.

Chapter 15: Nine: Seeking the Impossible
Annotation
Chapter progress: 23.78%
Highlight: what he labelled as ‘incoherence of thought
Notes: Fake capitalism.

Chapter 15: Nine: Seeking the Impossible
Annotation
Chapter progress: 24.76%
Highlight: Fellow of the Royal Society, which was known worldwide as the arbiter of scientific innovation.
Notes: Roman keymasters of the snake.

Chapter 16: Ten: The Heliograph
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Chapter progress: 25.41%
Highlight: The only solution was collaboration, which he immediately suggested,
Notes: Stolen tech by lizard person.

Chapter 16: Ten: The Heliograph
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Chapter progress: 25.73%
Highlight: Daguerre as a man of business had the skills needed to exploit the heliograph commercially.

Notes: Fake business person. Stolen technology. Elon Musk. Bill Gates.

Chapter 16: Ten: The Heliograph
Annotation
Chapter progress: 25.73%
Highlight: Crisis after crisis
Notes: Fake capitalism.

Chapter 17: Eleven: The Melancholy Artist
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Chapter progress: 28.99%
Highlight: The Pencil of Nature in 1844, Talbot

Chapter 18: Twelve: Fixing the Image
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Chapter progress: 31.27%
Highlight: There were, in addition, other more everyday demands on his time as the owner of a country estate and the village that surrounded it.
Notes: Covid vaccine and microchip required.

Chapter 19: Thirteen: The Latticed Window, August 1835
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.22%
Highlight: But Talbot was a man who took his social duties seriously; they were expected of a gentleman of the moneyed classes and of his standing in the community
Notes: Lizards only.

Chapter 19: Thirteen: The Latticed Window, August 1835
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.22%
Highlight: He was relieved to have completed his term as MP for Chippenham, having found political life at Westminster an enormous waste of time.
Notes: Lizards only.

Chapter 19: Thirteen: The Latticed Window, August 1835
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.22%
Highlight: scientific journals.
Notes: Peer reviewed toilet paper.

Chapter 19: Thirteen: The Latticed Window, August 1835
Annotation
Chapter progress: 34.53%
Highlight: without the immediate and easy interchange of ideas that we enjoy in the modern internet age,
Notes: Children in face mask.

Chapter 20: Fourteen: The Magic Cabinet
Annotation
Chapter progress: 37.13%
Highlight: How and why Daguerre came to use the chemicals and materials that he did is certainly unique in the history of photographic experimentation, for the path he followed appears to have been not just the path less travelled but a path that he alone pursued.
Notes: Fallen angel technology.

Chapter 20: Fourteen: The Magic Cabinet
Annotation
Chapter progress: 37.46%
Highlight: The ‘magic’ developing agent needed to reveal a latent daguerreotype image turned out to be mercury.
Notes: Mercury. Quick silver. Fallenangel tech.

Chapter 20: Fourteen: The Magic Cabinet
Annotation
Chapter progress: 37.79%
Highlight: Whether it was luck, fate, or just another myth, from here on the future of the daguerreotype was assured.

Notes: Nobody knows where photography came from.

Chapter 21: Fifteen: The Most Wonderful Discovery Ever Made
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Chapter progress: 39.74%
Highlight: It was a simple matter of securing proper credit where due.

Chapter 22: Sixteen: From Today, Painting is Dead
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Chapter progress: 41.37%
Highlight: Stendhal had just produced his second great novel, The Charterhouse of Parma.

Chapter 22: Sixteen: From Today, Painting is Dead
Highlight
Chapter progress: 41.69%
Highlight: Was it God’s will that man should seek to capture the most fleeting and temporal of his creations – the shadow?

Chapter 22: Sixteen: From Today, Painting is Dead
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Chapter progress: 43.0%
Highlight: and I do not see why a Gentleman with an Independent fortune should scruple to accept of any benefit that he has derived from his own Genius
Notes: LIZARDS ONLY.

Chapter 22: Sixteen: From Today, Painting is Dead
Highlight
Chapter progress: 43.32%
Highlight: the Young & Champollion controversy’ – an allusion to the much-publicized controversy over the first successful translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone.

Chapter 22: Sixteen: From Today, Painting is Dead
Annotation
Chapter progress: 43.65%
Highlight: Whatever it costs, she concluded, ‘money is nothing in the balance with Fame.’16

Notes: Snake talk.

Chapter 23: Seventeen: Photogenic Drawing
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Chapter progress: 46.91%
Highlight: The major issue at stake was whether the patent should be purchased outright with a once-and-for-all payment – which Daguerre thought sounded too much like a mercenary business transaction – or by means of a lifetime pension.
Notes: Take the lump sum and flee to the wilderness!

Chapter 24: Eighteen: The Académie des Sciences, August 1839
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Chapter progress: 47.88%
Highlight: a victory of science … In the kingdom of unending progress another
Notes: Proceed to injection facility for processing. CORPORATE SCIENCE.

Chapter 24: Eighteen: The Académie des Sciences, August 1839
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Chapter progress: 48.21%
Highlight: It all sounded exciting, but highly dubious – more like alchemy than art.

Chapter 24: Eighteen: The Académie des Sciences, August 1839
Annotation
Chapter progress: 49.19%
Highlight: This seems an odd coincidence: the French bill had been sent to King Louis-Philippe for his signature on the 1 August and the English patent was sent to Queen Victoria for her signature just one day later.
Notes: Lizard network.

Chapter 24: Eighteen: The Académie des Sciences, August 1839
Annotation
Chapter progress: 49.51%
Highlight: The patent therefore only provides the patentee with a means of legal redress to demand compensation if
Notes: Patents are useless.

Chapter 25: Nineteen: Daguerreotypomania
Annotation
Chapter progress: 51.14%
Highlight: In France King Louis-Philippe had elevated him from Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur – a high enough honour in itself – to the superior status of ‘Officier’ of the legion.
Notes: Roman ass kissing.

Chapter 26: Twenty: Portraiture
Highlight
Chapter progress: 52.44%
Highlight: it would need to find a way of capturing the human face.

Chapter 26: Twenty: Portraiture
Annotation
Chapter progress: 52.77%
Highlight: Photography was to become the first democratic art.

Notes: Garbage assertion.

Chapter 27: Twenty-one: The Pencil of Nature
Annotation
Chapter progress: 57.0%
Highlight: Having a patent is one thing, but protecting one’s intellectual property and pursuing anyone in the law courts who makes use of it illegally is quite another.
Notes: Patents are useless.

Chapter 28: Twenty-two: The Monopoly of the Sunshine
Annotation
Chapter progress: 58.96%
Highlight: instead of living off the land – wages that could be spent on more than just the necessities of life.
Notes: Somebody help us.

Chapter 31: Twenty-five: Art or Science?
Annotation
Chapter progress: 67.43%
Highlight: patenting was an expensive legal process and patents, once granted, were even more expensive to protect.
Notes: Patents are useless.

Chapter 31: Twenty-five: Art or Science?
Annotation
Chapter progress: 68.4%
Highlight: Many other art forms had been in existence in primitive form before humans even left the cave,
Notes: Red headed cave people.

Chapter 32: Twenty-six: The Mute Testimony of the Picture
Highlight
Chapter progress: 70.36%
Highlight: might it be possible,’ mused a correspondent to the Photographic News, that if the eyes of a murdered person were photographed shortly after death ‘upon the retina will be found depicted the last thing that appeared before them’ – in other words the face of the murderer?

Chapter 32: Twenty-six: The Mute Testimony of the Picture
Highlight
Chapter progress: 70.68%
Highlight: the first photograph was made to ensure that the process worked and that the second image made was almost certainly pornographic.

Chapter 32: Twenty-six: The Mute Testimony of the Picture
Highlight
Chapter progress: 71.34%
Highlight: one in five of children in the nineteenth century died before reaching the age of five

Chapter 32: Twenty-six: The Mute Testimony of the Picture
Annotation
Chapter progress: 73.62%
Highlight: The patent quickly became irrelevant,
Notes: Patents are useless.

Chapter 33: Twenty-seven: The Eye of History
Highlight
Chapter progress: 76.22%
Highlight: There was now no aspect of life that went by – no meeting, no ceremony, no war or public disturbance, no human rite of passage – ‘without photography being called in to perpetuate, as it were, a tangible, transferable memory of the occurrence

Chapter 34: Epilogue: Everyman’s Art
Annotation
Chapter progress: 79.15%
Highlight: At an even higher level of science, photography brings us images of phenomena and galaxies in the universe that are millions of light years away.
Notes: Techno space religion. Fake space objects.

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