If You Don't Write Fiction

by Charles Phelps Cushing

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 not close enough to the lens to be classified as "heavy foregrounds" nor yet far enough away to be panoramas. Buildings which are light in color and sunny street scenes fall into this division of exposures. When in doubt, take it at one twenty-fifth of a second with stop "16." You can't miss it far, one way or another.

Push the pointer on to "32" and the object to be photographed ought to be at some distance away. This is the stop for the open road and the sunlit fields—anything between an "average view" and a "panorama."

At "64" the scale is set for the most distant of land views, beach scenes and boats in the middle distance off-shore. You will learn by costly overexposures that water views require much less light than landscapes. Photographers have an axiom that "water is as bright as the sky itself." So at "64," which is proper exposure for the most distant of land panoramas, you begin to take waterscapes.

That tiniest pin hole of a stop, at the extreme right of the scale, is never to be used except for such subjects as the open sea and snowcapped mountain tops.