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Joseph William Heckman of the CPR

This is my review of Ralph Beaumont’s talk on Heckman and his CPR images. Unless otherwise noted the images used are courtesy of Canadian Pacific Corporate Archives.

Bob Lansdale, Clint, and I met with January’s speaker Ralph Beaumont and his friend Rod Clarke for a pre meeting supper at the Trio restaurant upstairs from our meeting room.

Ralph, who used to own the Boston Mills Press publishing company, wrote the Heckman CPR photography book and Rod did the proof reading, image editing and design. We mentioned in the meeting announcement that all images in the book used the original glass plates but we learned that the plates were destroyed years ago and the images came from the albumen contact prints. Due to the way they were permanently mounted in their albums, there was no way the prints could be directly scanned. Instead, the prints were photographed with a digital SLR in situ. Ralph and Rod are both train fanatics with little background in early photographic processes. The finished book is distributed by the Credit Valley Railway Co [http://cvrco.com/bookdistributing2015.htm] Continue reading →