Be very careful not to place the prints in water between the washings. Above all, never use your dishes for any other purpose. Some photographers, living in the country, complain that they cannot get up heat to boil a large enough quantity of developer for 12 × 10 prints. |Lamps.| We found an excellent heating apparatus in the tin spirit lamps with treble wicks, supplied by Allen of Marylebone Lane, with his portable Turkish baths. With two of these lamps we had no difficulty in heating a developer for 24 × 22 prints. The dish can be supported by blocks of wood at the four corners, and raised to the height required by other blocks, or a tripod. The prints when taken from the washing water should be dried on a clean sheet, and are finally improved by pressing with a warm iron. |Spotting.| For spotting, India ink is the most suitable medium. This, it is said, is permanent, and any shade can be got, but good India ink, like many other articles of trade, is a rare thing.
Texture of papers.
There are different kinds of paper sold by the Platinotype Company for printing, and the printer will of course choose the texture of paper that suits his subject. Delicate landscapes and small portraits should be printed on the smooth papers, while for strong effects, large figure subjects, and large portraits full of character, the rough papers are more suitable. |Colour.| The charcoal grey tint of ordinary platinotypes is apt to become monotonous in book illustration, and it is as well to vary it occasionally by using the sepia tints; these are quite suitable for landscapes and certain figure subjects. Directions are given by the company for producing this colour. A great desideratum is a red colour for portraiture, and it is to be hoped that Mr. Willis will see his way to producing a paper on which prints in what is called “Bartolozzi red” can be obtained. Red, though it does not give such true tonality, gives a truer impression of flesh and texture, just as sepia often gives a truer impression of certain kinds of landscape. But of course these tints must be used with judgment, and no one but a vandal would print a landscape in red, or in cyanotype. Having now disposed of the question of the printing process to be used, we must discuss some of the details incidental to printing.
Vignetting.
Whoever introduced the practice of vignetting was no artist, and the “dodge” was evolved from a misconception of the aims of art, or for commercial purposes. Its origin is obvious, the idea was taken from one of the incomplete methods of artistic expression, such as chalk drawing. In such methods the artist has a perfect right to leave the background untinted, or only to shade round the head so as to give it relief, but with a perfect technique like photography, vignetting is useless, nay inartistic and false, as it destroys all tonality. We get by this method a softly delicately lighted head, against a sparkling background, the two are incompatible, and not only that, but the photographer who vignettes is deliberately throwing away a most effective aid to perfect impression, namely, the relief effected by the reflected light from his background, and when you add to this the conventional shape of the vignetted head and shadows, the result is feeble in the extreme. Here, then, is another false god which has for years held sway. We ask the student, did he ever see a vignette painted by Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, Gainsborough, or Frank Hals? Such men knew too well the value of a background to throw it away; they could not have painted a vignetted head. Look at their chalk drawings, and the case is very different; there they were dealing with an incomplete method, and kept rigidly within their bounds. In our early photographic days, we learned printing from an industrial photographer, who did an extensive business in vignetted heads, and it was a source of great amusement to us to watch the mechanical application of the vignettes by the “head” printer. This is of course another source of the mechanical appearance of ordinary photographs; for by vignetting fifty different heads a certain uniformity must result, as in a regiment dressed in uniform, with of course the fatal result, the loss of all individuality, character, and of course art. The few photographic portraits that we have seen worth studying were certainly not vignetted. Mrs. Cameron did not vignette, she knew better. That people demand vignettes and pay for them is nothing to us, let photographers sell them as they do scraps and chromographs, and other fancy articles, if it please the childish and vulgar, but let them not be called works of art, for on the contrary they are certain indices of bad taste. Vignetting might be admissible in certain decorative cases in book illustration, as when a landscape decorates an initial letter, but in pictures for framing, never.
Combination printing.
The simplest application of this method is the printing of a cloud into a landscape from a different negative. Though it is far preferable to obtain the clouds on the same negative, and this is quite easy in ortho-chromatic photography, it is, if you use great judgment, admissible to print in clouds from a separate negative, but this requires an intimate knowledge of out-door effects, and the clouds must be taken in a particular way. Printing in clouds is admissible because, if well done, a truer impression of the scene is rendered. |Cloud negatives.| But the ordinary way of taking cloud negatives is much to be condemned. The practice is to point the camera to the zenith if need be, to focus sharply, to to use the smallest stop, develop and select for final use according to the lighting, indeed, not always being very particular on that point. But, by elevating the camera a point of sight is taken different from that employed in taking the landscape; by focussing sharply, often using a lens drawing falsely, the clouds are rendered false in tone and false in drawing. All this an artist detects in a moment, a craftsman, never. The first necessity, then, in taking cloud negatives is that the point of sight shall be the same as that chosen for the landscapes; the second that the clouds shall be so focussed and developed that their tonality shall remain true; and the third and most important point, that the cloud form shall be harmonious with the landscape. The very simplest truths of nature are daily ignored by photographers in the works they exhibit. There are often three, or even four suns in one landscape, or at least the evidence of them; mighty cumuli float over lakes where there is no ripple, and yet there is no reflection; or, as we have seen, reflections of clouds have been printed in where there are ripple marks; or heavy nimbi lighted from one direction are placed over cirro-cumuli lighted from another direction; or, again, a setting sun sinks to rest over wave-broken water that reflects glints of light from exactly the opposite direction.
How to take clouds.
The best way, then, if a cloud negative is wanted, is to take it at the same time as the landscape and from the same point of view, getting as much as possible the same impression as seen in nature. The exposure must of course be by a shutter set quickly. |To print in clouds.| We think the best way of printing in clouds so obtained, is to take a piece of damp tissue paper the size of the negative, gum it round the edges to the back of the negative, then with some blacklead and a stump blacken the sky out when the paper is dry, carefully following the contours of those objects which stand in relief against the sky with a lead pencil. In this way you can with marvellous accuracy stop out the sky, and the work being on the back of the negative and in plumbago, the contours still show the mingled decision and indecision of nature. The print is then taken, and afterwards the cloud negative is arranged as desired, the sky-line being covered with cotton-wool and the rest of the exposed landscape by a black cloth. No special printing frames are required for this purpose, only one a size or two larger than the negative you are printing from. Cloud printing, as we have said, is the simplest form of combination printing, and the only one admissible when we are considering artistic work. |Combination printing.| Rejlander, however, in the early days of photography, tried to make pictures by combination printing. This process is really what many of us practised in the nursery; that is cutting out figures and pasting them into white spaces left for that purpose in a picture-book. With all the care in the world, the very best artist living could not do this satisfactorily. Nature is so subtle that it is impossible to do this sort of patchwork and represent her. Even if the greater truths be registered, the lesser truths, still important, cannot be obtained, and the softness of outline is entirely lost. The relation of the figure to the landscape can never be truly represented in this manner, for all subtle modelling of the contours of the figure are lost. Such things are easy enough to do, and when we first began photography we did a few, but soon gave it up, convinced of its futility. |Rejlander.| Rejlander, though he tried it, soon saw the folly of such play, and he is the only artist we know of who used it. Mrs. Cameron and Adam Salomon never indulged in such things that we know of. Some writers have honoured this method of printing by calling it the highest form of photographic work. Heaven help them! The subject is hardly worth as many words, for though such “work” may produce sensational effects in photographic galleries, it is but the art of the opera bouffe.
Masks.