PHOTOGRAPHY OF TO-DAY.* To those amateurs who wish to know
just what photography is, this book is a real help. The subject is dealt with in language that is not technical ; and the reader will find him- self carried along so deftly from fact to fact that he is put in possession of valuable knowledge almost without realizing how carefully he has been helped over difficult places. Many of us are content with a very vague understanding of what a lens is, and how it forma an image which is caught upon a sensitive plate ; neither do we always know accurately how that plate comes to be sensitive to begin with, nor how it bands on the image permanently to the final paper print. It is good to have these things made clear to us, especially as the details are in themselves so interesting.
Those who have most things made easy for them to-day may like to hear something of the struggles of the early amateur, who had to clean his own glass plate and flood it evenly with collodion, and then sensitize it in a silver nitrate bath in the dark. He was obliged to pose and focus his sitter before the sensitizing was complete, and then beguile his victim into enduring an exposure of some minutes. How many would face the ordeal now ? The book goes on to explain the various uses of modern photography in illustrating and recording. The exact functions of the mysterious dots that are to be detected in half-tone block illustrations are very clearly set out. The three-colour process is made intelligible to the reader; but in summing it up the author makes the interesting remark that its aim. "is not to reproduce colour, but to imitate it. The perfection of the imitation depends not only upon the characteristics of the method, but upon the skill of the worker. The colour shown in the result is not impersonal evidence of the colour of the original." This accounts for a good deal. Strikingly coloured objects are easier to deal with than delicate tints of grey ; a bunch of flowers will make a braver show, but will not test the powers of a colour process so severely as the greys of a sober landscape. There are some good illustrations in the book, some of which are very useful in making clear what is written.
Previous page
