19th Century Photo Worth Half A Million Pounds In Royal Society's Collection

Expensive photos aren't a new thing, we did a round-up back in 2012 listing some of the most expensive photos ever sold and in 2014, Peter Lik sold a print for a whopping $6.5 million dollars but the super expensive photos discussed in the video above are a little older than those seen before. 

The photos, which are from the 19th century, are in a collection the Royal Society look after and they're valued, individually, from around £10,000 to £500,000. 

As well as the super expensive photos, they also have a paper written by William Henry Fox Talbot that was created at a time when people didn't really have a name for photography as it didn't exist. The paper's regarding what Talbot called 'photogenic drawings' where he discusses the early processes of photography and it's worth over £800,000. Talbot's research actually lead to the production of negatives which allowed its popularity to grow with the Victorians. 

The photos in the collection shown in the video were captured less than 15 year's after Talbot's paper and as Brady Haran says, even though they're from the 19th century, they're not that different to the landscapes we see and capture today. They even have the popular 'silk water' effect in them where rivers and waterfalls are the main subjects.