Practical Pictorial Photography

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 Excerpt: ...nothing else, and our mental attitude therefore for the moment is that of a lens of enormous focal length, so great that the angle of view is narrowed down to include only that one small object which for the time fills the whole plate. Similarly with a group of lofty mountains, though perhaps some miles distant, as we look at them and think about them we are unconscious for the time of anything else in the landscape until we shift our eyes, be it ever so little, and also shift our attention. Then we are doing by a series of actions what the lens does in one. The actual angle of view included by the eye has little to do with it. We have rather to consider the angle included by the mind, if we may so describe it. Our imagination enlarges the particular object which absorbs our attention, so that one might suppose that the best way to get a photographic representation which would agree with our mental impression would be to make our negative in the usual way and subsequently enlarge just one particular small portion. This might answer well enough up to a certain extent, but that say in a group of mountains the imagination enlarges one part or one feature more than another. We know the mountain peaks are lofty, and we think of them so, and we mentally enlarge them, but not the cottage at their foot, or the trees half way up. Thus, for instance, we look at Snowdon from the east and see its thre3 symmetrically arranged peaks, one of which we recognise as being loftier than its fellows--but photograph it, or measure it, and we shall find how very inconsiderable is its greater apparent altitude; and yet our mental impression is that of one peak distinctly higher than the others, and if we drew a representation of the group from memory we should probably at once bet...