Before With Flashlight and Rifle was published, the only successful photographs taken by night that were known to me were some few excellent pictures of certain species of American deer, secured by an enthusiastic sportsman (a legal official in the service of the Government of the United States) after years of untiring effort. After any number of fruitless attempts, this gentleman contrived to photograph these animals grazing by night near the banks of a river down which he drifted in a boat. He set up a row of cameras in the bow of his craft, and when it passed close to the deer standing in the water, he let his flashlight flame out, and in this way produced in the course of ten years or so—a number of very interesting photographic studies, which made his name well known in his own country and which won him a gold medal at a Paris Exhibition, where his work aroused much attention. I was familiar also with the “telephoto” pictures which Lord Delamere brought home from East Africa.[20] Those of Mr. Edward North Buxton were published first in 1902, so far as I know. I myself, I should explain, do not profess to be a complete master of the photographer’s art. Indeed, I rather rejoice in my ignorance of many of the inner secrets of the craft known only to experts, because I believe it has helped me to get a certain character into my pictures which would perhaps have eluded one whose mind was taken up with all the difficulties involved in the task.
At first sight the photographing of animals may seem a simple enough matter, but if we look at the photographs taken in zoological gardens or in menageries or game reservations, or photographs taken during the winter at spots to which the animals have had to come for food, or at the various touched-up photographs one sees, we shall find that there are very few of any real worth from the standpoint of the naturalist. Whoever would take photographs of value should take care that they be in no way altered or touched up. Touched-up photographs are never to be trusted.
THE APPARATUS WHICH I FIRST USED FOR MY NIGHT-PHOTOGRAPHS, WITH THE SHUTTER KEPT OPEN (see p. 687).
THE GOERZ-SCHILLINGS NIGHT-APPARATUS.
The story of my progress in the art of animal photography is soon told.
In 1896 and 1897 I was not adequately equipped, and I took only a few photographs, all by daylight.
After going through a careful course of instruction in Kiesling’s Photographic Institution, I did not succeed in entirely satisfying myself with the daylight photographs I took on my second expedition of 1899-1900. It was impossible at that time to photograph objects at great distances, the telephoto lens not yet carrying far enough. My efforts to photograph the animals by night proved entirely fruitless, for one reason because the flashlight apparatus would not work. It was exasperating to find that my heavy and expensive “accumulators”—procured after consultation with technical experts—refused to act, and I remember vividly how I flung them out into the middle of a river! I achieved but one single success at this period with a self-acting apparatus, namely the photograph of two vultures contending over carrion, here reproduced; one of them has been feeding, and the other is just about to assert its right to part of the meal. The attitudes of the two birds are very interesting, and one feels that it would have been very difficult for a painter to have put them on record. But all my other attempts failed, as I have said, from technical causes, and I had to content myself for the most part with photographing the animals I hunted, though I did succeed in getting pictures of a waterbuck and a giraffe at which I had not shot. My photographs won so much approval from experts on my return home that I was encouraged to go further in this direction.
But what difficulties I had to overcome! So far back as the year 1863 a German explorer, Professor Fritsch, now a member of the Privy Council, had set about the task of photographing wild animals in South Africa. Those were the days of wet collodion plates, and it is really wonderful how Professor Fritsch managed to cope with all the difficulties he had to face so far from all possibility of assistance. He succeeded in the course of his expedition in photographing an African wild animal upon a dry plate for the first time on record. By his kindness I am enabled to reproduce this historical picture here—it is a thing of real value. It is the photograph of an eland, at that time an animal often met with in Cape Colony, where game of all kinds has now been almost completely exterminated. Professor Fritsch’s account of his experiences should be heard for one to form any notion of the wealth of animal life that then adorned the South African velt. His photographs are especially interesting as the first of their kind. It was not until nearly forty years later that the English sportsmen already mentioned and I myself embarked systematically upon similar enterprises.