How keenly I regret that I had not the advantage from the first of the perfected photographic apparatus that has come into existence as the result of long experience! I look back with regret upon the many failures I experienced in my earlier efforts, the excitement of the moment often causing me to neglect some necessary precaution. Lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, and antelopes innumerable—nearly all my attempts to photograph them were fruitless. When I came to develop the negatives at night-time I would find a blurred suggestion of the objects I had seen so distinctly before me in the daylight, or else, owing to some mishap, an absolute blank. All the greater was my joy when on rare occasions I did succeed in getting such pictures as those of the rhinoceroses already referred to.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
A TELEPHOTOGRAPH OF OSTRICHES, SCARCELY DISCERNIBLE TO THE LEFT OF THE PICTURE.
I made it a practice to develop at night in my tent, as soon as I possibly could, all negatives that I thought at all likely to be successful. The only negatives I sent to Europe were duplicates of those which I had already developed myself. At home, of course, the developing can be done much more carefully. No one who has not had the experience can realise what it means to have to develop plates in the heat and damp of Equatorial Africa and with the kind of water at one’s disposal there. When I found that my negatives were successful, not content with developing them, I always made a number of bromide-silver copies of them. These were put away in separate cases and the original was despatched home as soon as possible. If this original negative got lost en route, I was almost sure of having one of the copies, even if some of the packing-cases got lost also.
The photographer can always console himself with the reflection, in the midst of all his hardships and mishaps, that the pictures he does succeed in taking count for more than so many head of game.
It is very interesting to note that my photographs of birds on the wing have put so many people, especially painters, in mind of the work of Japanese artists. Doflein, in his book Ostasienfahrt, speaks as follows of the peculiar faculty the Japanese have in this field of art. “The Japanese animal painters,” he says, “show a more highly developed power of observing nature than that of their Western fellow-workers. They render the swift, sudden motion of animals with astonishing dexterity.... They had learned to see and reproduce them correctly before the coming of instantaneous photography.... The Japanese seem to have a very highly developed nervous organism. Their art is evidence of this, no less than their methods of warfare—their effective use of their guns at sea, for instance.”
I would add to this my own opinion that an inferior shot would have no success whatever with a telephoto lens. You must have learnt to stalk your quarry warily—this is as important as a steady hand. A practised shot who knows how to get within range of the animals is peculiarly well fitted for the work. The least twitch at the moment of taking the photograph ruins everything, for even in the case of moving objects the exposure is not what can be accurately called instantaneous, owing to the peculiarity of the lens.
I have already expressed my view that this non-instantaneous exposure (when not too prolonged) imparts a certain softness and vagueness to the photograph which give it an artistic effect. It gives scope also for the personal taste and preferences of the operator. When taken against the horizon photographs require less exposure than with the velt for background. The dark green of the trees and shrubs no less than the red laterite soil offering unfavourable backgrounds for photographs of animals in Africa, as elsewhere, one has to pay particular attention, of course, to the effects of shadows, shadows which to the eye seem quite natural producing extraordinary effects upon the negatives.
