Category: Photography

Photography. — Photography is permitted almost anywhere. No trouble will usually be experienced in changing plates at night, as most rooms have good shutters. A piece of non-actinic fabric and a few drawing pins will be found useful for covering the little window over the door by which a passage is often lit. Let me assure those unused to long tours with cameras in foreign countries, where they may never be again, that it is very easy to develop as one goes along. I carried half a dozen light unbreakable 7 1/2 by 5 dishes, two boxes of Anderssen’s eikonogen cartridges, a bag of hypo, a folding candle-lantern, a couple of wide-mouthed bottles, a bib, a duster, and a large piece of mackintosh to lay over the table. These reposed peacefully at the bottom of a strong leather box, in company with many dozen of Lumiere’s most rapid quarter plates and other trifles. I used one of Shew’s “Xit” quarter plate cameras, and carried two Goetz lenses, one of six, the other of four inch focus. The latter was invaluable for architecture and interiors. A swing back and rising front are necessary. An aluminum stand proved thoroughly unworkmanlike; it was on the bayonet principle, and as sure as one division declined to pull out, another would get jarred and refuse to go in. Finally pieces of the legs took to dropping off like a frost-bitten nose. I used a light folding wooden tripod the next time. An exposure of about the thirtieth of a second with F 16 is right for a general view of the exterior of a building well lit by the sun of Spain. On my last visit to Spain I used Imperial plates, developed them at home, and obtained very satisfactory results.

Cities and Sights of Spain: A Handbook for Tourists, by Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond, 1904

Keeping his mouth shut and working fast as he had learned to on this job, Prescott got the baby crawling on the dirt floor between pans set to catch the drip from the roof. He got the woman and Dago and the baby and two smaller children eating around the table whose one leg was a propped box. By backing into the lean-to, between two old iron bedsteads, and having Carol, Johnny, and Dago hold flashes in separate corners, he got the whole place, an orthodox FSA shot, Standard Poverty. That was what the Foundation expected. As always, the children cried when the flashes went off; as always he mollified them with the blown bulbs, little Easter eggs of shellacked glass. It was a dump, but nothing out of the ordinary, and he got no picture that excited him until he caught the woman nursing her baby on a box in the corner. The whole story was there in the protective stoop of her figure and the drained resignation of her face. She looked anciently tired; the baby’s chubby hand was clenched in the flesh of her breast.

From “Pop Goes the Alley Cat,” by Wallace Stegner