Rock House garden gate

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 2 Jul 2010

Rock House was the home of the painter and pioneering photographer, David Octavius Hill (1802-70), one of the first men in Britain, after Fox Talbot, to embrace the new technology. Collaborating initially with Robert Adamson, who was more skilled in the technicalities of the early photographic processes, his artist's eye has left us many fine portraits of family and friends, University divines and Church of Scotland 'disrupters'; but also humble Newhaven fisherfolk, soldiers and urban scenes that give us a flavour of his time. Many of the portraits were made in a studio in the garden at the back of the house. The gate shown here gives direct access to the promenade on the Calton Hill. I wonder what he would have made of my cheap little entry-level compact digital camera which can take more photographs in a day than he could in his lifetime? - though not, I hasten to add, of the same significance! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Octavius_Hill

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