Loch Katrine

One of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot made his first "photogenic drawing" in 1835 and developed the calotype process in 1840, discoveries that occurred around the same time as Louis Daguerre's photographic innovations in France. Unlike the daguerreotype, however, Talbot's calotype could produce multiple prints from a single negative by capturing a latent image on light sensitive paper and developing it on paper coated with salts. Calotypes appeared as if impressed into the page, taking on the paper's texture and recalling mezzotints or etchings. Sun Pictures in Scotland featured twenty-three calotypes of sites connected with the life and writings of Scotland's beloved Romantic author Sir Walter Scott. Loch Katrine was the setting for Scott's most popular poem, The Lady of the Lake (1810).