Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

We have shown why the human eye does not see nature exactly as she is, but sees instead a number of signs which represent nature, signs which the eye grows accustomed to, and which from habit we call nature herself. We shall now discuss the relation of pictorial art to nature, and shall show the fallacy of calling the most scientifically perfect images obtained with photographic lenses artistically true. They are not correct, as we have shown, and shall again show, but what is artistically true is really what we have all along advocated; that is that the photographer must so use his technique as to render a true impression of the scene. The great heresy of ‘sharpness’ has lived so long in photographic circles because firstly the art has been practised by scientists, and secondly by unphilosophical scientists, for all through the lens has been considered purely from the physical point of view, the far more important physiological and psychological standpoints being entirely ignored, so that but one-third of the truth has been hitherto stated.

What a picture is.

To begin with, it must be remembered that a picture is a representation on a plane surface of limited area of certain physical facts in the world around us, for abstract ideas cannot be expressed by painting. In all the works in the world the painter, if he has tried to express the unseen or the supernatural, has expressed the unnatural. If he paints a dragon, you find it is a distorted picture of some animal already existing; if he paints a deity, it is but a kind of man after all. No brain can conjure up and set down on paper a monster such as has never existed, or in which there are no parts homologous with some parts of a living or fossil creature. We defy any man to draw a devil, for example, that is totally unlike anything in existence. All so-called imaginative works fall then within the category of the real, for they are in certain parts real because they are all based on realities, even though they may be utterly false to the appearance of reality. By this we mean that an ideal dragon may be based on existing animals; his form may be a mixture of a Cobra, Saurian, and a reptile, as is often the case; so far it may be real, but then the way in which it is painted may be utterly false, for the natural effect of light and atmosphere on the dragon may and probably will be ignored, for there is no such animal to study from. The modern pre-Raphaelites are good examples of painters who painted in this way; they painted details, they imitated the local colour and texture of objects, but for all that their pictures are as false as false can be, for they neglected those subtleties of light and colour and atmosphere which pervade all nature, and which are as important as form. Children and savages make this same error, they imitate the local colour, not the true colour as modified by light, adjacent colour, and atmosphere. But what the most advanced thinkers of art in all ages have sought for is the rendering of the true impression of nature.

Proceed we now to discuss the component parts of this impression.

Tone and Atmosphere.

When we open our eyes in the morning the first thing we see is light, the result of those all-pervading vibrations of ether. The effects of light on all the objects of nature and on sight have been dealt with in the beginning of this chapter, it only remains, therefore, to deduce our limits from these facts. In the first place, from what has been said in that section it is evident we cannot compete with painting, for we are unable to pitch our pictures in so high a key as the painter does, and how limited is his scale has been shown, but by the aid of pigments he can go higher than we can. It has been shown, too, that it is impossible to have the values correct throughout a picture, for that would make the picture too black and untrue in many parts. This fact shows how wrong are those photographers who maintain that every photograph should have a patch of pure white and a patch of pure black, and that all the lighting should be nicely gradated between these two extremes. This idea arose, no doubt, from comparing photography with other incomplete methods of translation, such as line-engraving.

The real point is that the darks of the picture shall be in true relation, and the high lights must take care of themselves. By this means a truer tone is obtained throughout. Now to have these tones in true relation it is of course implied that the local colours must be truly rendered, yellow must not come out black, or blue as white, therefore it is evident that colour-corrected plates are necessary. But such plates are useless when the quantity of silver in the film is little, for the subtleties of delicate tonality are lost, which are not compensated for by gain in local colour, and this is a point the makers of orthochromatic plates must take into consideration. It will be seen now why photographs on uncorrected plates (even when the greatest care and knowledge in using them is exercised) are not, as a rule, perfectly successful, and why the ordinary silver printing-paper is undesirable, for it exaggerates the darkness of the shadows, a fatal error. False tonality destroys the sense of atmosphere, in fact, for the true rendering of atmosphere, a photograph must be relatively true in tone; in other words the relative tones, in shadow and half shadow, must be true. If a picture is of a bright, sunlit subject, brilliancy is of course a necessary quality, and by brilliancy is not meant that “sparkle” which so delights the craftsman. Of course the start of tone is naturally made from less deep shadows, when the picture is brightly lighted, for the black itself reflects light, and all the shadows are filled with reflected light. It will be seen, therefore, that it is of paramount importance that the shadows shall not be too black, that in them shall be light as there always is in nature—more of course in bright pictures, less in low-toned pictures—that therefore the rule of “detail in the shadows” is in a way a good rough-and-ready photographic rule. Yet photographers often stop down their lens and cut off the light, at the same time sharpening the shadows and darkening them, and throwing the picture out of tone. It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that “strength” in a photograph is not to be judged by its so-called “pluck” or “sparkle,” but by its subtlety of tone, its truthful relative values in shadow and middle shadow, and its true textures. Photographers have been advised by mistaken craftsmen to spot out the “dotty high lights” of an ill-chosen or badly-rendered subject to give it “breadth.” Such a proceeding of course only increases the falsity of the picture, for the high lights, as we have shown, are never high enough in any picture, and if a man is so unwise as to take a picture with “spotty lights,” he is only increasing his display of ignorance by lowering the high lights, which are already not high enough. This does not of course apply to the case where a single spot of objectionable white fixes the eye and destroys harmony, but to the general habit of lowering the high lights in a “spotty” photograph. Spotty pictures in art as well as in nature are abominations to a trained eye, and it is for that very reason that such subjects are more common among photographers who are untrained in art matters than in the works of even third-rate painters. The effect of the brightest sunlight in nature, for reasons explained, is to lessen contrast, the effect of a sharply-focussed, stopped-down photograph is to increase contrast in the subject and thus falsify the impression. As the tendency of “atmosphere” is to grey all the colours in nature more or less, and of a mist to render all things grey, it follows that “atmosphere” in all cases helps to give breadth by lessening contrast, as it also helps to determine the distance of objects. As shown in the previous chapter, this aërial “turbidity,” by which is meant atmosphere, takes off from the sharpness of outline and detail of the image, and the farther off the object is, the thicker being the intervening layer of atmosphere, the greater is the turbidity cæteris paribus, therefore from this fact alone objects in different planes are not and should not be represented equally sharp and well-defined. This is most important to seize—as the prevalent idea among photographers seems to be that all the objects in all the planes should be sharp at once, an idea which no artist could or ever did entertain, and which nature at once proves to be untenable. The atmosphere in the main rules the general appearance of things, for if this turbidity be little, objects look close together, and under certain other conditions are poor in quality.

Drawing and Lighting.

In addition to tone and atmosphere, the diminished drawing of objects as they recede from us (mathematical perspective) helps to give an idea of distance, but by choosing a suitable lens, which does our drawing correctly, we need not regard this matter of drawing. A minor aid to rendering depth is the illumination of the object, a lateral illumination giving the greatest idea of relief, but the photographer should be guided by no so-called “schemes of lighting,” because, for more important reasons, it maybe advisable to choose a subject lighted directly by the sun, or silhouetted against the sun. All depends on what is desired to be expressed. For example, an artist may wish to express the sentiment and poetry of a sunset behind a row of trees. Is he to consider the minor matter that there will be little relief, and it is not a good “scheme of lighting”? No, certainly not, otherwise he must forgo the subject. Nature ignores all such laws. The only law is that the lighting must give a relatively true translation of the subject expressed, and that a landscape must not be lighted by two or more suns. In portrait work, even, it must be remembered that the aërial lighting must stand out against the background, for in all rooms there is a certain amount of turbidity between us and distant objects.

On the Impression.