The High Street, Edinburgh, with John Knox's House,

1844, printed ca. 1905

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson were photographic partners who met when Hill, a painter and lithographer, was working on a monumental painting for which he wanted to use photographic portraits to capture people’s likenesses. Adamson joined the project as the photographic technician. With Hill’s eye for composition and Adamson’s technical mastery, the pair photographed friends, family, architecture, and genre scenes, exploring the artistic potential of the medium. This image was likely included in six volumes of photographs that Hill and Adamson advertised but never published. Despite the advances in technology that allowed for such large photographs, exposure times were still quite long, so people and other moving things became ghostly blurs, rendering busy streets like this one remarkably still.