These ideas of perspective will be found very useful in photographing architectural subjects, wide-angle lenses often being indispensable here. Caution must be observed in using them on these subjects, however, for if the buildings stand in confined positions, where there is no room to move the camera backward, the picture will have an unnatural effect, and might be compared to the eye of an observer trying to see something that was too close for convenience.
In portraiture, the perspective will suffer very much if the distance between the sitter and the lens be too small, and the lens of too wide an angle. In this case, the cheeks will look too narrow in proportion to the length of the face, while the hands and feet will be absurdly larger than they ought to be if at all obtruded. The head, and indeed the whole figure, will look more rotund and more life-like if a fair distance—say twice the sitter’s height—is kept between the lens and the sitter. If this should give too small a picture, a lens of longer focus will have to be used. Objects look broader when taken near at hand with wide-angle lenses. Interior views of buildings, halls, etc., where there is plenty of room to keep the camera well back, will not be found difficult, but the interiors of small private houses and rooms will often be very unsatisfactory subjects because there is not room for the camera to be set well back and give a life-like, natural effect.
Photographs of long, narrow objects will be great failures in the pictorial point of view if the camera be brought too close, and so that the nearer portions are unduly magnified while the more distant become dwarfed in size. Here we see one of the principal reasons why the photographer should have lenses of different focus, so that if he is compelled to take an unfavorable point of view he may not be confined to one focus and angle.
To be continued.
[5] The equivalent focus of a compound lens is taken as equal to the focus of a single lens which would form an image of the same size.
EVOLUTION OF FORM IN COLLEGE ROWING.
BY E. M. GARNETT.
I.—THE HARVARD STROKE.
SCIENTIFIC rowing may be properly called a modern luxury. It may be said, with a moderate degree of certainty, that neither the Greeks, the Romans, nor yet the early English, were in the habit of pulling themselves about in ten-inch shells provided with anti-crab swivel rowlocks and ball-bearing slides. Had any one of them been caught in such an act he would have been condemned, in all probability, to drink the hemlock, or worshipped as a wizard. Of course, from time immemorial there have been certain vague principles regulating the application of the weight of the body to the oar. But up to the time when that eccentric genius lubricated the seat of his boat and the seat of his trousers with some fatty substance, and slid his greasy way to victory, rowing was much more a matter of brute strength than of exquisite skill. And with the evolution of the sliding seat from the crude but effective idea, possibilities were offered for great improvements in the art of pulling an oar. During the last twenty years new inventions and radical changes in the rigging of boats have necessitated a departure, not only from former methods of rowing, but also from its recognized tenets. The principles are not immutable—as some would have us believe. For example, it is a physical impossibility, with some styles of rigging, to apply much power at the end of the stroke. Still, different systems have their ardent supporters, and the superiority of one over another is apparently a mooted question.