Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 4))

And it is here that I chiefly enjoy the assertion of my pet heresy, the
dependence, all but wholly, on pure photography. So fine are the sub-
tleties of gradation in light and shade in a cathedral study, so unimprovable
are the relations of tone and mass, that any attempt to improve on them by
alterations of density in various portions of the negative during development
(when no possible knowledge can be had of the effect it will have on the
positive), only leads to failure, real failure, though to too many it may seem
an apparent success.
In this work (as indeed in all other camera exposures) a sufficiently exposed
negative is the second and absolute essential; the first is extreme care,
knowledge, and skill in the choice of lighting, of the hour and conditions in
which the exposure should be made. When to expose and when not to
expose are perhaps the most diflicult conditions to determine; and the dis-
regard of them or the neglect of proper study of them leads to trying the
impossible task of improving a bad negative into a good one. And it is
photography, of course, that gets blamed for this ignorance of the worker. As
I have said elsewhere, these attempts at local control in and during develop-
ment lead to all manner of false tone-values; and certainly one never gets
or can get by this means a really true rendering of the exquisite values of
nature’s gradations, which it is photography’sspecial and proud mission so
adequately to record.
Nowadays, with our modern lenses and their enormous value in this class of
work of giving equal illumination over the whole plate, even when the
lens is much raised; together with the color-corrected films that give due
rendering to all the varying shades of age and weathering in old cathedral-
stones; and with the (to me invaluable) invention of the double film, which
now makes easy the rendering of subjects of contrasting lights and shadows,
giving a real sense of soft detail in the shadows while preserving all the
proper contours and values of the lights, such as no single film, on whatever
kind of support (glass least of all), can hope to rival; with these instruments
of precision at our command, it is surely our own fault if we can not bring
our artistic knowledge and skill to the same level of accomplishment.
Unfortunately, photography will do so much so cheaply—so easily, that
is—that a real study of its full possibilities is but rarely given it by the
so-called (but untrained) artistic worker. He gets things he likes, and stops
there, instead of asking how much better they could have been had he
known the full capabilities of his tools or his subject. And how few are
trained artists enough to be trusted to be content with just what they happen
to like! Can we always account for the faith that is in us?
These attempts of mine to render with some poetic justice the solemn beau-
ties of our cathedrals will, I hope, tend to one small result, to tempt
toward a more leisurely visiting of these unique buildings. During my
stays in a cathedral town I have but rarely seen the same faces among the
visitors on two consecutive days. And if there is one thing certain, it is
that a visit of merely a day to one of these noble edifices is all but useless;
it is only after repeated visits, in quiet leisure, that the place reveals itself in

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