If You Don't Write Fiction

by Charles Phelps Cushing

There you have the theory. Apply it with common sense and you will meet with few failures. You scarcely need to be cautioned that if an object is dark in color it will require proportionately more exposure than the same object if it is white. Through various weathers and seasons, experience will keep teaching you how to adapt the rule to changing conditions of light. Certain handbooks and exposure meters will be of service while you are learning the classifications of subjects.

You have been told how the rule works. Press the "T" bulb again to click your shutter shut and prepare to set out on a picture taking excursion. Set the time scale at one twenty-fifth of a second, and leave it there. Load up a film. Replace the back of the camera. Take along a tripod. Don't forget that tripod! With that you insure yourself against getting your composition askew, or losing a good picture on account of a shaky hand.

Suppose the expedition is gunning somewhere in the backwoods. Down the stony winding road saunters one of the natives in a two-piece suit. Overalls and a hickory shirt constitute his entire outfit. He grows a beard to save himself the labor of shaving. His leathery feet scarcely feel the sharp stones of the highway. Here is a picture worth preserving, for the "cracker" type is becoming a rarity, almost extinct. Set your pointer at "8" and take his full length. If you wish a close-up of his head, set the pointer at "4."

A little farther and the road plunges into a shady valley. Under the trees ahead is a log cabin, dappled with the sunlight and the shade of dancing leaves. Use your judgment about whether such a scene requires "8" or "4." If in doubt, use "4," for the danger here is that you may under-expose.

In a clearing where the shade of the trees has little effect, stands an old water power mill. It is simply an "average view," and you can safely snap it with a "16" stop.

The friendly razorback hogs under the mail hack make a picture with a heavy foreground. They fall into the "8" classification—half in shade, half in sunlight.

The road leads us at last to a river. An old-fashioned ferry boat is making a crossing in midstream. From the hilltop where we first survey it the scene is a landscape, distant view, and can be taken with a "32." But when you get down to the water's edge and shoot across the shining river, beware of overexposure. Stop down another notch.

Do you see now how the theory works? Give it a fair trial and you will agree that taking pictures—the mere taking, with no bothering your head about developing, printing, toning and the like—is a matter no more baffling than the simple art of learning to punch the letters on the keyboard of a typewriter. Keep at it, never neglecting an opportunity to practice. Keep experimenting, until you can fare forth in any sort of weather and know that you will be able to bring back something printable upon your film or plate. If the day is not bright, shove your timer over to one-tenth of a second, or to one-fifth.

Certain experts in photography will bitterly deride this advice to keep the time set at one twenty-fifth of a second and to vary nothing but the size of the lens aperture. They will point out—and be quite right about it—that the smaller the aperture the sharper the image, and that a more professional method of procedure is to vary the timing so as to take all pictures with small stops.

To which I can only answer that this is all well enough for the trained photographer and that in these days of my semi-professionalism I practice that same sort of thing myself. But in the beginning I was duly grateful to the man who gave me the golden maxim of "the closer the object, the larger the stop; the more distant the object, the smaller the stop"—a piece of advice which enabled a novice, with only one simple adjustment to worry about, to take a passably sharp, properly exposed picture. So I pass the word along to you for whatever it may be worth.