A SNAP SHOT WITH A DETECTIVE CAMERA.
The return journey to Portland was without incident. There I boarded the steamer and spent another delightful day on the broad bosom of the Columbia river, winding up among the grand basaltic cliffs and towering mountain peaks of the Cascade Range. Again the little camera came into requisition, and though the day was cloudy and blusterous, though snow fell at frequent intervals, and though the steamer trembled like a reed shaken by the wind, I made a dozen or more exposures on the most interesting and beautiful subjects as we passed them, and to my surprise many came out good pictures. Most of them lack detail in the deeper shadows, but the results altogether show that had the day been clear and bright all would have been perfect. In short, it is possible with this dry-plate process to make good pictures from a moving steamboat, or even from a railway train going at a high rate of speed. I made three pictures from a Northern Pacific train, coming through the Bad Lands, when running twenty-five miles an hour, and though slightly blurred in the near foreground, the buttes and bluffs, a hundred yards and further away, are as sharp as if I had been standing on the ground and the camera on a tripod; and a snap shot at a prairie-dog town—just as the train slowed on a heavy grade—shows several of the little rodents in various poses, some of them apparently trying to look pretty while having their "pictures took."
