Images and images keep accumulating in my Hard drive, most are product of sleepless nights , nights dedicated almost obsessively to digital painting and manipulation...then totally exhausted i ended asleep just after sunrise

And the bigger problem is that i never found the time to order and upload the fruits of that work, if not for minimal part

Too often when i force myself to reorder and upload my last work a little internal demon awoke first whispering doubts on some detail ,then suggesting some quick edit , a couple of click and will be done... little demon knows well that opening Gimp i will be hooked and instead then just correct a detail i will start to explore variants, and then explore the effect of all the variant on similar image
...shortly it will end hours later with few new folder full of mostly misplaced images to sort out , much more chaos then before and no any image uploaded

Those too were risking to end up forgotten in my virtual drawer, and would be a pity because the original were excellent, the author
the best ...here i am tempted to say the best photographer because their work was to document with the maximum precision possible, obviously the result of their work were no photography but lithography or anyway typographic illustrations

But there is another reason why i am tempted to call them photographers, sure not all but not few of photographer specialized in landscapes were really using photographic camera;
camera camera were invented MUCH before the photographic emulsion to fix the lights on paper, and were considered a useful tool for landscape painter

The only conceptua ldifference with more recent reflex was what opposite to the lens,
instead of the film was a large frosted glass, behind the glass , protected from external light by a large black curtain camera was the photographer, i mean the painter:
first he had to fix the canvas on the back of frosted glass, then draw trying to copy what saw in transparency
That is much more difficult of what may be imagined even more difficult when the image to copy is upside down as in those ancestor of camera

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So back to this series you may imagine the painter in the desert , a poor indigenous behind weighted down by the 50 kilo foldable camera he is carrying , and the desert

in the desert places and marvels forgotten by centuries ...we are with Napoleon in Egyptinvited to The French expeditionary force that occupied Egypt under Napoleon's command from July 1798 until 1801 included some of France's leading scientists.

While in Egypt, the scientists recorded investigations on natural history, archaeology, physical geography, technology, weights and measures, hydrography, meteorology, chemistry, medicine, and other aspects of Egyptian culture and environment.

Their work was published on returning to France as the Description de l'Égypte, in volumes of truly monumental dimensions, with beautiful engraved plates.

now the engraved plates are really beautiful but the reproduction of the plates that can be found on Internet most of time sucks, to use a kind euphemism,

Alas i could not find better reproduction so i try to improve what available

Almost all the B&W are not B&W but toned... i never used sepia, i don't like sepia, but some have a yellow-lightbrown cast that may remind sepia

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Very nice work, PhotoComix. I admire the Egyptian civilization, but never went there. It's my way of helping to preserve the traces of that civilization. Tourist always contributes to the destruction.

Very cool images and a fascinating story about how they were captured. Photography in all it's forms has been around for much longer than most think. I once saw a tv programme that suggested Leonardo Da Vinci did some experiments using a very early form of image capture. It's amazing to think he was doing this several hundred years before my DSLR was invented.

Thank, glad you like
I am so worry that may words could get misinterpreted (happened often lately) ... Obviously i didn't intend to say that all landscape painters were using "camera obscura " ,but that ancestors of modern Camera were well know and and in the toolbox of many painter.

Another curiosity and a nice ecologic way to reproduce Niepce experiment, which success dated the invention of photography.
The first "photo" was done without camera, Niepce was searching some chemical combination for "capture " light rays, and the goal was get the contour of object posed over the paper covered by wannabee photographic emulsion

But he kept on failing and failing , day after day

Till the day he forgot his key in the lab when finally he found the key and lifted, and lifting could saw the silhouette of the key nicely printed on the paper below:
basically he already solved but could not notice before sensitivity to the light was really low, so several hours of exposition were needed... and that happened when he forgot the key...

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I start this message to add more photos (i edited 114, not thinking to post all but are several interesting ) but writing down a idea pop out so i am going to post a very special tutorial

On the last two images you posted the modified image is real good. It's so much more detailed. The camels are clearer, as are the rocks and the sand surface in general. Also on the the pillars the detail is much more defined. This is very good work.