FLASHLIGHT FAILURES III. TWO TURTLE-DOVES (ONE ON THE WING) SET MY NIGHT-APPARATUS WORKING. MISHAPS OF THIS KIND OFTEN OCCUR.
FLASHLIGHT FAILURES IV. A BLACK-HOOFED ANTELOPE DOE SWERVES SUDDENLY ROUND DURING THE FLASH.
I would give the intending photographer a special warning against careless handling of the explosive mixture. The various ingredients are separately packed, of course, and are thus quite safe until the time has come to mix them together (I know nothing of the ready-made mixtures which are declared to be portable without danger). This business of mixing them with a mortar is dangerous undoubtedly, for the introduction of a grain of sand is enough to cause an explosion. I myself, as well as others, have had some very narrow escapes whilst thus occupied, and, as every photographer knows, the work has had fatal results in several instances of recent years.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIES OF ANTELOPES SHOT BY THE AUTHOR AND NOW TO BE SEEN PRESERVED IN GERMAN MUSEUMS. 1, 2. WATERBUCK (COBUS. AFR. ELLIPSIPRYMNUS, Ogilb.), MALE AND FEMALE. 3. ELAND (OREAS LIVINGSTONI, Sclat.), FEMALE. 4. MASAI HARTEBEEST (BUBALIS COKEI, Gthr.), YOUNG BUCK.
My apparatus revealed several shortcomings even in the improved form. It was not absolutely light-proof, and it had to be set up always, for its automatic operation, in the brief tropical dusk. If no animal presented itself for portraiture the plates exposed were always wasted, unless at dawn they were withdrawn again. (This is not the case with the apparatus as since perfected.)
Many wrong impressions are current in regard to this kind of photography. It can be managed in two ways. Either the photographer himself remains on the spot to attend in person both to the flashlight and the exposure, or else the mechanism is worked by a string against which the animal moves. Before I took my photographs I had been a spectator of all the various incidents represented in them, watching them all from hiding-places in dense thorn-bushes, thus coming, as it were, into personal touch with lions and other animals. Though not so dangerous really as camping out on the velt, where one’s fatigue and the darkness leave one defenceless against the possible attacks of elephants or rhinoceroses, you need good nerves to spend the night in your thorn-thicket hiding-place with a view to flashlight snapshots of lions at close quarters. In that interesting work Zu den Aulihans, by Count Hoyos, and in Count Wickenburg’s Wanderungen in Ostafrika, the reader will find interesting and authentic accounts of night-shoots which correspond with my own experiences. Count Coudenhove in his first book describes very vividly the effect upon the nerves of the apparition of numbers of lions within a few paces of him, when concealed in a thorn-bush at night.