With this it may be that when the foreground is moderately sharp, trees more remote are so ill defined as to appear as a collection of little blots and irregular patches. Whilst sharp detail in all places may not be productive of pictorial effect, yet the extreme opposite will be displeasing in another way, and it will be best to secure just so much definition and no more as shall save the representation from appearing to have been wilfully put out of focus—once let the destruction of detail be obvious and we betray the artifice by which we are working, which is just what we should avoid.
In the case just supposed then, we may now introduce the first stop, simultaneously racking the lens in a little until we get middle distance without unpleasantly obvious blurring. The foreground may be a little out of focus, and in practice I find it is rather helpful to general effect if detail is sacrificed more in the foreground than in the middle distance.
This I believe is contrary to the teaching of many, but my feeling is that with a sharply defined foreground the eye is attracted and the interest so far arrested, that it is difficult to travel further and enter into the poetry and sentiment of the scene beyond.
Wide-angle lenses have a double disadvantage, shared in part by so-called rapid rectilinear doublet lenses. In the first place they flatten the view, bringing distant planes to appear as near as the nearer ones, and by including a comparatively wide angle they bring into the plane of the foreground, objects so near that they appear out of proportion, and hence proportions are false when judged as the observer must judge by the standard of visual perspective.
A long-focus, narrow-angle lens necessitates a camera which racks out to a considerable length, and probably a greater extension than any camera in the ordinary way can give, would be an advantage on some occasions.
Passing reference has been made to the interpretation of colours in nature in their true relative value of black and white.
If we have a subject in which brilliant orange-coloured rushes in autumn are seen as glowing bright against a background of dark blue water, and the rushes made still more golden of hue by the ruddy rays of a sinking sun, a difficult case is before us.
Such a case I remember very well in the south of Devonshire, close to what is known as Slapton Ley. It was late afternoon in November, and from over the rounded hills behind me to the westward, the declining sun sent warm red rays on to the belt of faded reeds which stretched out into the expanse of the still land-locked water of the Ley—a great sheet of fresh water which placidly lay under the shelter of the bank of shingle which alone separated it from the ever-restless sea—placidly listening to the ceaseless voices of sea music, and at this particular hour reflecting the sky deep blue and of almost leaden hue—just above the bank rose the full moon, orange in tint, on a background of blue-green sky—the yellow reeds, kindled into glowing amber tints by the sun's rays, flamed out from the deep blue water—yellow the shingle bank against the blue water and green-blue sky, deeper yellow the moon as it rose from out the sea. So grand a scheme of colour that by its side the essays of the most daring painter might well seem feeble, so exquisite a poem that the intrusion of the photographer, analysing the values and tones and calculating his powers of reproduction seemed like sacrilege. In the main it was yellow, orange-yellow, and red standing out as luminous against the deep blue of water and only a little less blue sky. It was gorgeous non-actinic colour appearing as light against a highly actinic but darker colour. The consequence of an indiscreet exposure with an ordinary plate might be anticipated to produce dark rushes against a pale grey background of water, and so probably the very effect we were minded to secure, reversed and dissipated.
This is an extreme case, perhaps, but throughout the whole range of nature the contrasting and blending of adjacent colours is so subtle a thing that I should feel one were throwing away at least a possible advantage by not using colour-corrected or isochromatic plates on nearly every occasion, and in order to get the full advantage of isochromatic plates, I should consider the addition of a yellow screen an essential.
The rapidity of one's plates, isochromatic or otherwise, must be governed entirely by the nature of the subject, as also to some degree must be development and subsequent printing.