Example

As this loss of outline increases with the greyness produced by atmosphere, it follows that it is greater on grey days and in the distance; and less on bright, sunshiny days. For this reason, therefore, the student must be very careful on bright days about his focussing, for on such days there is often no mist to assist him, but still he must keep the planes separate, or he has no picture. Let us imagine an example: A decaying wooden landing-stage stands beneath some weeping willows at the edge of a lake. From the landing-stage a path leads through a garden to a thatched cottage one hundred yards distant; behind the cottage is an avenue of tall poplars. On the landing-stage stands a beautiful sun-bronzed village girl in a plain print dress: she is leaning against the willow and is looking dreamily at the water. We row by on the lake, and are struck by the picture, but above all by the dazzling native beauty of the peasant girl: our eyes are fixed on the ruddy face and we can look at nothing else. If we are cool enough to analyze the picture, what is it we see directly and sharply? The girl's beautiful head, and nothing else. We are conscious of the willow-tree, conscious of the light dress and the decaying timbers of the landing-stage, conscious of the cottage, away in the middle distance, and conscious of the poplars telling blue and misty over the cottage roof; conscious, too, are we of the water lapping round the landing-stage; - we feel all these, but we see clearly and definitely only the charming face. Thus it is always in nature, and thus it should be in a picture. Let us, however, still keep to our scene, and imagine now that the whole shifts, as does scenery on a stage; gradually the girl's dress and the bark and leaves of the willow grow sharp, the cottage moves up and is quite sharp, so that the girl's form looks cut out upon it, the poplars in the distance are sharp, and the water closes up and the ripples on its surface and the lilies are all sharp. And where is the picture? Gone! The girl is there, but she is a mere patch in all the sharp detail. Our eyes keep roving from the bark to the willow leaves and on from the cottage thatch to the ripple on the water, there is no rest, all the picture has been jammed into one plane, and all the interest equally divided. Now this is exactly what happens when a deep focussing lens and small diaphragms are used, the operator (for no artist would do this) tries to make everything sharp from corner to corner. Let the student choose a subject such as we have suggested, and put what we have imagined into practice, and he will see the result. Yet this "sharp" ideal is the childish view taken of nature by the uneducated in art matters, and they call their productions true, whereas, they are just about as artistically false as can be. For this reason, too, it must be remembered that the foreground is not always to be, rendered sharply. If our principal object is in the middle distance, let us say, for example, some cottages ou the border of a lake; our foreground, consisting we will suppose of aquatic plants, must be kept down, and purposely made unimportant. This is done chiefly by the focussing and stopping.

Mrs. Cameron's portraits.

Newton.

Among the few satisfactory portraits we have seen are, as we have already said, those by the late Mrs. Cameron. In all of these, that fatal sharpness has been avoided; her focussing was carefully attended to. The well-known miniature painter, Sir W. J. Newton, one of the first vice-presidents of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, distinctly advised that all portraits should be thrown a "little out of focus." The falsity of focussing a head sharply is shown by the fact that by doing so freckles and pimples, which are not noticed by the eye, stand out most obtrusively, indeed a case is on record, where an eruption of small-pox was detected in its earliest stage by the lens, while nothing at all could be detected by the eye, though this was but partly due to the lens. This false focussing has brought in its train another huge falsity - retouching - of which we shall speak more fully hereafter.

Scientific Diagrams

Sharp focussing, too, by making objects tell too strongly, throws them out of tone, and so ruins the picture. When sharpness is obtained by stopping down, the diaphragm cuts off light, injures normal brilliancy, exaggerates shadows, and so throws the picture out of tone. Of course, if the object in view is to produce a diagram for scientific purposes, such, for instance, as photographs of flowers for a work on botany, or offish for a work on ichthyology, or of butterflies for a work on entomology, the most brilliant illumination possible should be aimed at, and the focussing should be microscopically sharp, for such works are required to show the structure as well as the form. But, above all, the drawing should be correct, and this is obtainable only by the correct use of lenses, which, as we have pointed out, has not always been the case. If, on the other hand, the operator wishes to produce pictures of flowers, butterflies, fruit, fish, etc, the same rules hold good as for any other picture. As an example of the treatment of flowers, the student will do well to study Mr. Fantin's paintings of flowers. We have never yet seen flowers, fruit, or still life artistically rendered by photography, though we have seen some diagrams to all appearances perfect, but in which the drawing must have been a little false. We have seen it stated by craftsmen who have produced diagrams of microscopic and other objects, that they were untouched (and rightly so), and that, therefore, these diagrams were artistic and true to nature. Of course, from what has been already said, it is obvious they were not necessarily true to nature (though, perhaps, none the less useful for that), and the statement that they were "artistic" arises of course from a total misconception as to what that word means.

Fantin's Flowers

Here, then, we must quit this subject, and we hope that we have impressed upon the student the fundamental necessity for exercising much thought and judgment and care in focussing, stopping down, and using the swing-backs, for these three all work together, and are quite as important as the questions of exposure and development.

Of course there is no absolute state of "sharpest focus," but when we use the word "sharp" we mean the sharpest focus obtainable by any existing photographic lens when used in the ordinary way.