One of his colour pictures shows Naomi Savage, his one-time assistant who developed her own career as a photographer, and no doubt inspired by Man Ray, also invented a process called photographic engraving.

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Each is, appropriately, adorned with a four-claw dragon on the battery cover, and the engraving process is rather lengthy: it involves 20 stages and takes four highly-skilled master craftsmen 36 hours, eight of which are dedicated just to the dragon's scales.

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Although the process of transferring a musical composition from a gleam in the composer's eye into a handwritten manuscript and, finally, a performance-ready score has come a long way from the days of copper-plate engraving, it's a process rife with the possibility of transmittal error.

WSJ: Ravel| Mother Goose| New York Philharmonic| Arbie Orenstein