If You Don't Write Fiction

by Charles Phelps Cushing

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 pictures—what 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).