NEARLY ten years ago I took lessons in landscape photography, and since then have made hundreds of photographs of places rarely visited, of strange people and wonderful vegetation, which have delighted the eyes of many friends. Assuming that many members of the Reading Union will wish to retain more permanent pictures of vacation scenes this summer than can be carried in memory alone, I propose to show how they can do this with little trouble and expense.
First, I must congratulate you upon your good fortune in being able to enter upon the study of photography in the year 1882, rather than twenty, or even ten, years earlier. In no other department of science, except perhaps in electricity, has such an advance been made. It was only in 1839 that Daguerre published his success in obtaining an image on a silver plate, and in 1851 that the collodion process—that most in use at the present day—was given to the world. But within the past few years improvements have been made, by means of which the art is not confined to professional workmen, but can be enjoyed by all the young folks in the land.
I well remember the disadvantages attending outdoor photography, even no longer ago than when I made my first attempts. By the collodion or wet process it was absolutely necessary to carry a large trunk full of chemicals and bulky apparatus. Among other things there was the “dark tent;” in its most compact form it was a box, about two feet and a half square, with curtains and aprons arranged so as to exclude all actinic or chemical light. After setting your camera in position and focusing the picture, you had to retire into the dark tent, arrange the curtains about you to exclude all outside light, and consequently air, and then you coated the glass plate with collodion and dipped it into the “silver bath” to make it sensitive to light. This operation required several minutes, and if the day was hot and sultry, the operator in the dark box was nearly suffocated before he emerged with the prepared plate ready for the camera. After exposing this he was obliged to hide himself again in that hot box full of chemical fumes, and there “develop” the picture supposed to be upon the glass.
With the discovery that plates could be prepared ready for use at any time, and that would remain sensitive to the action of light for months, a new field was opened, in which any one could wander who had the inclination. By this discovery all the bottles of chemicals, with the dark tent and the clumsy apparatus, were done away with. Materials for a hundred photographs can now be carried in a small valise or in an ordinary trunk amongst clothes and books.
Though an amateur, and having no greater interest in photography than arose from a desire to secure pictures of the spots I visited, I hailed the appearance of the “dry plates” and their simpler mode of use, for I was heartily tired of the old way. My fingers were always black with silver stains, and my clothes streaked and stained with salts of iron and soda. My accidents, from the tipping over of chemicals, and in struggling over mountain roads and the beds of mountain torrents, were more than I could count on my fingers. In Florida, whenever I crawled into the dark tent—pitched, perhaps, on the border of a swamp or in the deep woods—the mosquitoes and sand-flies would make furious attacks upon my legs and nearly drive me wild, and I would be haunted by fear of the snakes and alligators that might attack me in that defenseless position—with my head in a sack and my hands employed. One day an enormous old billy-goat, taking offence at the outlandish appearance of my tent, as I was at work in it, half concealed from his view, charged on it with such force as to knock us all in a heap. When I had crawled out from the ruins, expecting to learn that an earthquake had passed by, I saw that billy-goat standing calmly by, chewing his cud, and shaking his head sidewise, as much as to say, “Get into that box again, and I’ll knock you over a second time!” In the West Indies it was always necessary to hire two negroes to carry my trunk, and as they invariably bore their burdens on their heads, the silver solution would sometimes leave a black streak down their faces, even darker than their ebony countenances!
The new discovery did away with all this trouble. I was quick to see this, and in one of my trips to the tropics carried a camera and a stock of “dry plates.” Alas! I had too hastily adopted a crude invention. I climbed mountains, descended into craters of volcanoes, threaded tangled thickets, and penetrated to secluded valleys to photograph new scenes with my new instrument. Having perfect faith in the new invention, I did not test my plates with chemicals on the spot, but kept them till I returned, and then gave them to the photographer to manipulate. My carelessness was well rewarded, for of the nearly one hundred plates, not one contained a perfect picture. I was in a condition then to sympathize with the great Audubon, who had a trunk full of drawings, the result of a year’s labor, destroyed by mice.
Unlike him, I had not a sufficiently powerful incentive to repeat my travels, and the anticipated pictures were gone forever. Nothing daunted, I next year procured another machine and tried again, this time in Mexico. In that year the inventor had not been idle, and I informed myself upon the merits of his invention so that my results at the end of the journey were such as greatly pleased me and my friends; for from the plates of glass exposed to light in the camera flashed out fac-similes of strange idols of stone, grand old ruins, snow-capped volcanoes, valleys almost hid in dense vegetation, palms, tropical plants, and the picturesque features of that strange country.
But, without further preface, let me tell you how you may take pictures this summer without any of the hindrances that I had to encounter in my first attempts.
The first thing needed is a camera, which in its simplest form is a darkened box, with a lens in front, through which the scene is focused upon a plate in its back—a plate of glass prepared with chemicals so that its surface is sensitive to the light admitted through the lens.
A few seconds of time is generally sufficient for the transmission of an impression to this plate, and before and after that “exposure” it must be kept away from all light until the “latent image”—the picture we cannot yet see—has been brought out and “fixed” by means of chemicals. This forms the “negative,” which is to the finished photograph what an engraved block is to the engraving on paper. To obtain this negative is your first object; having got this, you may produce from it as many prints as you like, at very little cost, either by taking it to a photographer, or by continuing the process and printing them yourself.