Perspective.
This section the student should read over carefully, understanding thoroughly the “point of sight” and the causes of violent perspective. For in photography, though his lens may be true in drawing, he can as easily obtain violent perspective as the draughtsman, by placing the lens too close to his model. Fore-shortening, too, should be thoroughly understood. Aërial perspective has been simply treated by us in this work, and the various remarks of Burnet on this subject must be taken cum grano salis.
Chiaro-oscuro.
Chiaro-oscuro.
This term means light and shade. Now the term “chiaro-oscuro” is very misleading, for it is used by different artists to mean different things. The whole of photography depends on the proper management of light and shade, for our drawing is done for us; but we prefer to use the more modern term, “tone,” to express what we mean by light and shade; that term we have already fully explained. Chiaro-oscuro, as we understand it, is the arbitrary placing of masses of light against masses of shade to produce certain desired effects; it is, therefore, conventional, and akin to the law which required all trees to be painted fiddle-brown. It is needless to say the only way such a conventional chiaro-oscuro can be obtained in photography is by arranging the objects in nature, or by retouching, and both are against our principles. The student, then, must, as we have said, master “tone,” that is his chiaro-oscuro, his light and shade, and he must always remember to look for “breadth” in his treatment. |Breadth.| Breadth is found in all good work, and it depends in photography not entirely upon light and shade, but upon the focussing and developing as well, as we have already indicated. Why are spotty-lighted, sharply-focussed, brightly-developed negatives so “noisy” and garish and inartistic? It is that they lack “breadth.” It must not be thought from this that no sunny pictures have breadth; on the contrary, if the masses are large, and the planes well rendered, and the tonality true, there can be as much breadth in a sunny picture as in a grey-day effect. It has been said that “breadth” is a device of the painters, but this is mere nonsense. Let the student look well at a simple stretch of grass-land bordering a still lake, on a damp, misty evening, and then he will see breadth. Let him focus that scene as sharply as he likes, including a portion of sky as well, and develop and print from it, and he will find breadth, and he will probably have a clear understanding as to the meaning of the word.
Mr. Burnet divides chiaro-oscuro into five parts, viz. light, half-light, middle tint, half-dark, dark. This arbitrary division is hypercritical. For working purposes, light, half-tone or middle tint, and dark, are quite sufficient; other subdivisions are far too subtle and numerous to be considered theoretically, and, practically, truth of tone is only to be learned by long experience and study, and we believe all the directions given by Mr. Burnet for producing relief, harmony, and breadth, to be artificial and useless. An examination of the plates shows clearly how futile are his deductions, and how untrue in light and shade, viz. tone, they all are.
Composition.
Composition.
Mr. Burnet opens with the statement that “geometric forms in composition are found to give order and regularity to an assemblage of figures.” This is the first principle on which is built his structure of geometrical composition. We will omit the dicta of literary men on pictorial art which Mr. Burnet is so fond of quoting, but which we consider too worthless to do more with than mention. Let us then apply ourselves to the study of his thesis.
His first remarks are upon angular composition, and as he finds that these lead him into conventional methods, he goes on to say that this conventionality can be rectified by balance. Even if we would follow this form of composition our means are limited, for, unlike the painter, we cannot alter and re-arrange. However, we have no wish to make “angular compositions,” and consider them false in theory. Painters, on the other hand, must settle these matters for themselves; we know how many settle them, that is by ignoring all such teachings as nonsense. Next we come to the “circular composition,” which, we are told, is “applicable to the highest walks of art,” wherever they may be. Soon after this we come upon the truest remark in the book. “Artists generally prefer the opinions of untutored children to the remarks of the most learned philosophers,” and we fear most modern artists prefer the teachings of nature to those of that philosopher John Burnet, F.R.S. Finally, Mr. Burnet winds up with the words, “I must also caution the young artist against supposing that these modes of arrangements are given for his imitation. I merely wish him to be acquainted with the advantages any particular composition possesses, that in adopting any invention of his own, he may engraft upon it these or similar advantages.”