Last updated 05:33, Friday, 23 May 2008

It took four seconds to take a photograph. The subject had to freeze, not move a muscle, stay absolutely motionless, as the photographer focussed the wooden box of the camera perched solidly on its heavy tripod, and placing his head beneath the thick black cloth, he captured the scene that lay before him in light-responsive chemicals on a glass-plate.

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The lady on the lake: A wonderfully romantic view of Ullswater beneath Stybarrow Crag. ‘The Abraham Brothers were creating works of art’

Capturing the Mountains: The Lake District through the lens of the Abraham Brothers, Abraham Photographic. £25

The resulting picture transformed the world before it from the garish fleeting colours of technicolour nature into the eternal stillness of black-and-white.

The momentary, thanks to the patience of those motionless subjects, became the statuesque.

The permanence of the mountains was revealed.

Four seconds was easy if you were posing in the studio. There would be a painted arboreal backdrop to imitate the openness of nature.

For one picture George and Ashley Abraham, the famous Keswick photographers of Lake District, came out from under their black cloths and exposed themselves to the scrutiny of the lens.

Both are dressed in their best heavy tweed three-piece suits with collar and tie, even though they are brandishing ice axes and coils of climbing rope. Ashley, seated, is the more robust of these two middle-aged men. He looks benignly at the camera hiding the expression on his lips beneath a luxuriant moustache. George holds his axe more resolutely, but his hair is thinning and his look more quizzical.

Four seconds is difficult if you are on the end of a rope, perched precariously on an exposed crag half way up Napes Needle or stretching every muscle to claw a rocky handhold in the cleft of Kern Knotts Crack.

It is even more difficult if you are Stanley Watson, leading a climb up Innominate Crack and you are bent horizontally double with your feet pressed against the rock face and your hands tensed around the adjoining rock.

And it must have been pretty terrifying to be half-way up the Eagle's Nest Ridge on the very direct route and sprawled across the rock face with one toe just maintaining a foothold and two hands seeking a grip on the rock above. And then having to wait while the photographer performed his magic.

But these men must have waited, stayed motionless for their four or more seconds. These wonderful, clear, sharp pictures are there to prove it.

And four seconds would be easy if you were a mountain. Simply to remain as you always had remained like that craggy, cracked, fissured wrinkled North Face of Scafell, bright and alert in the sunshine or tranquil and at peace in the brilliant white snow.

A picture of the Central Buttress on Scafell is a wonderful study in textures. The rock in the right foreground is densely cracked and crinkled, that in the mid-ground is less marked, more shaped and patterned and the background is a cloud-dappled sky. The Abraham brothers had probably added the clouds from another photograph.

They were not averse to touching up their plates, lightening or darkening as the mood required, using all means necessary and available to create the perfect picture.

They were artists. The picture was carefully posed, just as the rowing boat with its hooded figure waits on the lonely, rocky shore of Wastwater, insignificant against the shimmering vastness of the mountains. The Abraham Brothers were creating works of art.

And the proof is here today. This magnificent book – it is almost elephant folio in size – does justice to these two great Lakeland pioneers.

They were there in the vanguard of climbing and in the vanguard of photography, helping to create something of the image we have of the lakes and mountains.

One picture shows Ashley climbing up a tricky cleft half way up a rock-face. His right leg is planted firmly on George's shoulder as he looks for the next handhold.

Theirs was a co-operative effort. They captured a timeless world.

Capturing the Mountains is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.com.