CHAPTER III

HOW TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS

FTER he has bought or rented a typewriter,

the would-be free lance in the non-fiction field has his workshop only half equipped. One more machine is an urgent necessity. Get a

camera.

Few of our modern American newspapers and magazines are published without pictures; so anybody ought to be able to perceive how absurd it is to submit an unillustrated manuscript to an illustrated periodical. Good photographs have won a market for many a manuscript that scarcely would have been given a reading if it had arrived without interesting pictures; and many a well-written article has been reluctantly returned by the editor because no photographs were available to illustrate it.

There is only one way to dodge this issue. Just as you can hire a typist to put your manuscript into legible form, you can pay a professional photographer to accompany you wherever you go and take the illustrations for your text.

But the same vital objection holds here as in the case of the professional typist-the costs will cut heavily into your profits. With a little practice you can learn to do the work yourself. After that, you can operate at a small fraction of the expense of hiring a professional.

Your work soon enough will be of as high a quality as anything that the average commercial photographer can produce, and, better yet, it will not have any flat and stale commercial flavor about it. Nothing is more static and banal than the composition that the ordinary professional will produce if you fail to prevent him from having his own way. Ten to one, all the lower half of the picture will be empty foreground, and not a living creature will appear in the entire field of vision.

It cost the present writer upward of $150 to discover this fact. Then he bought a thirty dollar postcard kodak and a five dollar tripod and told the whole tribe of professionals to go to blazes. The only time since then that he has ever had to hire commercial aid was when he had to have heavy flashlights made of large

rooms.

So save yourself money now, instead of eventually. Even if thirty dollars takes your last nickel, don't hesitate. For a beginning, if you are inexperienced in photography, rent a cheap

machine with which to practice-a simple "snapshot box" with no adjustments on it will do while you are picking up the first inklings of how to compose a picture and of how much light is required for different classes of subjects.

After you have practiced with this for a while, go out and buy a folding kodak. If you have the journalistic eye for what is picturesque and newsy the camera will quickly return 100 per cent. upon the investment.

The one great difficulty for the beginner in photography is that he does not know how to "time" the exposure of a picture. The books on photography are all too technical. They discuss chemicals and printing papers and all the finer shadings of processes carried on in laboratories under a ruby light. But what the novice longs to know is simply how to take pictureswhat exposure to allow for a portrait, what for a street scene, what for a panorama. He usually fails to give the portrait enough light, and he gives the panorama too much. He is willing to allow a professional finisher to do his developing and printing. What the beginner wants to read is a chapter on exposure. As an operator, he is seeking for a rule of how and some examples of its application.

If you lack a simple working theory, here is one now, in primer terms:

The closer the object which you wish to photograph is to your lens, the more light it requires; the farther away it is, the less light it requires.

This may sound somewhat unreasonable, but that is how a camera works. A portrait head, or anything else that must be brought to within a few feet of the lens, requires the greatest width of shutter aperture (or, what comes to the same thing, the longest exposure); and a far-away mountain peak or a cloud requires the smallest aperture (or the shortest exposure).

To understand thoroughly what this means, take off the back of your kodak and have a look at how the wheels go round. Set the pointer of the time dial on the face of your camera at “T” (it means "time exposure") and then press the bulb (or push the lever) which opens the shutter. Looking through the back of your camera, make the light come through the largest width of the lens. You can do this by pushing the other pointer on the face of your kodak to the extreme left of its scale-the lowest number indicated. On a kodak with a "U. S." scale this number is "4."

You will see now that the light is coming through a hole nearly an inch in diameter. If it were a bright day you could take portrait heads outdoors through this sized aperture with an exposure of one twenty-fifth of a second.

Using this same amount of time, the size of

the shutter aperture should be reduced to a mere pin hole of light to make a proper exposure for far-away mountain tops, clouds, or boats in the open sea.

Suppose we make our problem as simple as possible by leaving the timer at one twenty-fifth of a second for all classes of subjects. We will vary only the size of the hole through which the light is to enter.

For a close-up, a portrait head, we operate with the light coming through the full width of the lens.

Now push to the right one notch the pointer which reduces the size of the hole. This makes the light come through a smaller diameter, which on a "U. S." scale will be marked "8." Only half as much light is coming through now as before. This is the stop at which to take full length figures and many other views in which the foreground is unusually prominent. Buildings which are not light in color should also be taken with this stop. In general, it is for heavy foregrounds.

Push the pointer on to "16." If your scale is "U. S." you will notice that this is midway between the largest and the smallest stops. It is the happy medium stop at which, on bright days, you can properly expose for the great majority of your subjects, those hundreds of scenes