The Jungfrau from the same Standpoint (sixteen miles distant), Telephoto Lens.
At Venice one turns instinctively toward the grand Piazza, the Mecca of many a traveller as well as of the Venetians themselves. St. Mark's Cathedral offers many studies for the camera, and for many years the glass mosaics upon the upper part of the front of the building were a perplexing problem to me, for the balcony was too near and the pavement below was too far away for successful work with the ordinary lens; and if taken from a near position below they were so distorted as to be useless. The problem was not solved till the advent of the telephoto attachment, which procured the studies with ease. After making a picture of the whole front of the cathedral from the centre of the piazza in the ordinary way, the camera was moved a little to the right, so that one of the large flag-poles would not interfere, and the upper left-hand mosaic, representing the "Descent from the Cross," was telephotographed [pp. [466]-[67]]. The result is about the same as that which might have been obtained in the ordinary way from the top of a scaffold fifty feet high and about forty feet from the mosaic.
A Cocoanut-tree, St. Kitts, British West Indies.
Cocoanuts on the Tree, St. Kitts, British West Indies—Telephoto Lens.
As all the illustrations mentioned were made with the idea of reproducing them as lantern slides, which are only about three inches square, they do not indicate the full power of the attachment in a single case. Therefore I placed my camera near a window in one of my rooms and photographed the row of dwellings across the back yards [p. [465]]. The actual distance from the camera to the first dwelling is one hundred and thirty feet; to the chimney, one hundred and fifty-four feet. Then, after putting on the telephoto attachment and extending the front of the camera as far as the bellows would permit, I telephotographed one of the chimneys on the third house, the only change in the camera being a slight inclination so that the chimney would be in the centre of the plate. This picture, when compared with that taken with the ordinary lens, shows an enlargement of nearly sixteen diameters, which is considerably more than the capacity or power of a very large field-glass.