The Quarto

THE HEAVENS

No. 61 (Spring/Summer 2025)

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Capturing Clouds

Jakob Dopp

Graphics Cataloger

Daguerrotype of Niagara Falls taken by Thomas Martin Easterly in 1853. The clouds can be seen behind the waterfall.

In this daguerreotype view, famed photographer Thomas Martin Easterly (1809–1882) somehow captured the clouds above Niagara Falls in 1853. It remains unclear how he managed to expose the plates for the perfect amount of time with the perfect amount of daylight to achieve this—his was a remarkable talent far outside the norm.

Today, it is all too easy to take for granted that we can go outside and take high quality photographs of the natural world without too much thought or effort. Nineteenth-century photographers encountered far more obstacles in pursuit of their art and were frequently frustrated by an inability to adequately record such basic elements of nature as clouds in the sky.

Photographers using the two earliest photographic processes, the daguerreotype and the salt paper print, found the cloud conundrum particularly problematic. Exposure times required for rendering features in the sky were shorter than those needed to render the landscape, as the photosensitive emulsions were more sensitive to the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum. This often resulted in daytime skies becoming overexposed in the final product. For salt prints, lengthy exposure times meant that, for the most part, skies appeared as blank spaces, with borders between cloud and sky indistinguishable. For daguerreotypes, an effect called “solarization” would often manifest, in which the sky appeared to have a blue tint as a result of the daguerreotype’s relative sensitivity to ultraviolet light. Unless the photographer possessed remarkable skill, any hint of white cloud formations would typically be subsumed by the larger sky.

The following decades saw significant evolution in camera technology and the introduction of new photographic methods such as the dry plate collodion process, which slowly but surely made it more feasible for photographers to produce landscape views that adequately depicted the sky. However, many photographers still found the process wanting and opted for alternative solutions. Rather than waste precious time (and money) chasing a perfect shot, a photographer could simply draw cloud shapes directly onto the negatives or use photo-manipulation tools like burning and dodging to achieve the desired effects. Many photographers would simply remove the sky from the equation altogether by blacking it out on the negative so that the sky was completely featureless in the print.
Daguerreotype of John D. Appleton House which has been over-exposed.

The daguerreotype of the John D. Appleton house (unknown photographer, [1850-1859]), is a classic example of solarization caused by an overexposed plate. Bright conditions and a long exposure resulted in the blue tones visible in the final image.

Salt print depicting William Young's mansion exterior.

This architectural profile of the mansion of William Young (1755-1829) is a good example of a salt print lacking all cloud features.

Many studios also relied on a technique called “combination printing,” in which separate negatives were taken of a landscape and a sky before the scenes were printed together to form a coherent, albeit fabricated, scene. A photographer could create a negative exposed for a landscape scene, black out the sky on that negative, create a second negative of the sky (ideally one with compelling cloud formations), and then create a positive print of the landscape scene that was overlaid with the sky view. Some photographers even had a rotating stock of sky scene templates that they could plug in to any landscape view to fill the void seamlessly. While some photographers felt this was a disingenuous practice, for many this was seen as both a practical necessity and an artistically superior choice. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t literally the same sky that was visible at the moment a photograph was taken, as combination printing allowed one to impose an even more aesthetically pleasing sky of one’s own choosing.
The multitude of artistic choices and scientific challenges faced by 19th-century photography are fascinating to contemplate, and it’s always enlightening to examine the myriad ways in which these obstacles were creatively overcome. While at times this author bemoans his 21st-century smartphone camera’s inability to replicate a beautiful sunset exactly as it appears to his naked eye, he also reminded himself that his dilemmas are much fewer and far lesser than those surmounted by his predecessors.
1869 photographs of the solar eclipse, with signs of being retouched.

Focusing skyward could more easily yield cloud forms, eliminating the need to juggle the gap in exposure time required for near landscape and distant heavens. A.K.P. Trask (1831–1900) produced these images of the 1869 solar eclipse, which show signs of heavy retouching but also seemingly authentic cloud forms.

Stereograph of men hunting in the woods. Clouds can be seen in the sky.
Stereograph of lake shore at a distance. Clouds can be seen in the sky.
Stereograph of lake shore. Clouds can be seen in the sky.

Look closely at this series of stereographs by Michigan photographer Ephraim P. Harris and you will notice vibrant clouds filling the sky. However, if you look even more closely, you will soon realize that the same cloud formations appear across every one of these images. There is no question that the photographer concocted these scenes using the popular technique of combination printing. Because the sky template appears to have been overlaid directly across both the left- and right-hand stereo frames, it produces a headache-inducing dissonance when these images are viewed through a stereoscope, as the cloud forms are different in each frame.