Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) was a Hereford born Victorian pioneer photographer. You have him to thank for the light meter, he was the inventor of what became known as the Watkins Bee Meter, the first commercially available exposure meter. You might have seen a series of blog posts I did a couple of years ago about him.
Last night I launched the Kickstarter project for my forth coming book. In it I shall be looking at the photography of Watkins, showing how the county he photographed has changed in the past hundred years or so. For the best part of this year I have been traveling around Herefordshire, seeking out the places he photographed and putting my tripod where he put his.
We are lucky that the archive of his negatives is held at Hereford Museum, along with his camera equipment, the staff there have been invaluable in the course of researching this book. On the Hereford Museum website they have many of his images on file that you can look at. But by no means the entire archive. Fortunately they have accepted my offer to scan and digitize the rest of his archive, an amazing opportunity! I shall begin doing this in thee next couple of weeks staring with the images needed for reproduction in the book then continuing with the rest of the archive.
I shall be self-publishing this book, as well as researching, shooting and editing the images, I have been labouring over my laptop...through the night on occasion...getting the manuscript ready for publication. All that now remains is to drop in the digital versions of Alfred's pictures once they have been collated. Publication costs are expensive so please take a minute to check out my Kickstarter page and support independent photojournalism. A link to this is below:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jimwood/then-and-now-a-photographic-journey-through-herefo
UK Press Photographer/Photojournalist. All images © Jim Wood - All rights reserved.
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