In four and a half years and through nearly 3,000 images, the Scottish team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson created the earliest substantial body of self-consciously artistic work in the new medium. Hill was a locally prominent painter in Edinburgh with a keen sense of composition and an affable manner that put his sitters at ease. Adamson, 20 years his junior, brought to the partnership an extraordinary mastery of the negative-positive photographic process invented just a few years earlier by William Henry Fox Talbot. Together, they produced technically precise, and artistically rendered photographs, like this lovely portrait.