Quote o' the Day

This was sent in by dwig, who notes that replacing "chemistry" with "software" is all that's needed to bring the quote up to date:

"But with the practice of photography came the sad knowledge that there is no royal road to the taking of good pictures. Although money might be lavishly spent in the purchase of costly apparatus, yet it was soon found that some knowledge of chemistry, and some artistic taste, together with practice in manipulation, and neatness and accuracy in working, were indispensable to success."

—W. Jerome Harrison, History of Photography, 1887

Mike
(Thanks to dwig)

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[hugh crawford]

I keep dreaming of software where the sliders have names like Hydroquinone, Metol, Sulfite, Bromide, Pyro, Vitamin C, Alkali, Dilution, Agitation, Exhaustion, Hot Water, Cyanide, and Icecube.
A Chloride <---> Bromide slider and a Gold <---> Selenium slider would be pretty nice too.

That said, Lightroom 4 is pretty wonderful and can be tweaked into exhaustion and staining behaviors, it even has a "reticulation because you didn't use hardener and screwed up the wash and drying" slider cleverly labeled "detail".

[John Holland]

Fully recovered darkroom geek that I am, I would actually like to read his appendix on the "discovery of the gelatino-bromide process."

BTW, "gelatino-bromide" would make for a great trade name for a deluxe printing paper. Or a really bad Italian ice cream.

[Mike Johnston]

"I would actually like to read his appendix on the 'discovery of the gelatino-bromide process.'"

John,
I believe you can--I didn't look, but I think the entire text of the book is online at the link.

Mike

[Emily Cartier]

Archive.org's books are OCR scanned, but not always proofread. They have quite a number of really hard to find craft books, but the OCR software often has made the book unreadable thanks to the odd characters introduced. An occasional OCR mistake isn't a big deal. Having every few words have a strange character or three, or letters swapped is a bit daunting. The PDF scans are usually ok, but PDF readers are so awful as a general rule that it takes a lot to make me put up with a PDF for more than a page or two.

Project Gutenberg tends to have a much higher quality level, but they do not appear to have tackled this book as yet.

[mike plews]

"I keep dreaming of software where the sliders have names like Hydroquinone, Metol, Sulfite, Bromide, Pyro, Vitamin C, Alkali, Dilution, Agitation, Exhaustion, Hot Water, Cyanide, and Icecube.
A Chloride <---> Bromide slider and a Gold <---> Selenium slider would be pretty nice too."
Ths B&W Styler plug in does some of this (sorta). Bottom line is that if you really want to have fun you have to stain your fingers.

[Lxpeg]

Things never really change much over time, do they?

From Pictorial Lighting (First Edition) by William Mortensen 1935:

"Far more than considerations of convenience are involved in this move for simplification. In a clutter of equipment lies the way to aesthetic, as well as economic, bankruptcy. Nothing can so distract one from the main issue in an art as the piling up of incidentals that go along with it. In photography this mania for equipment has gone to the most absurd extremes. The advertising pages of every photographic publication set forth in high astounding terms the advantages and virtues upon dozens of expensive gadgets that you simply cannot afford to be without. And thousands of pictures are ruined every day because the photographer is too concerned with his latest acquisition of equipment to pay any attention to the picture he is taking" :Page 13

"It should not be necessary to make apologies for achieving a simplification in the complicated procedures of photography, but such is the perversity of human nature, that people are often insulted when shown a simpler way of doing a thing that they have accomplished by Herculean efforts. Simplicity of equipment also goes against the very instinct very strong in many amateur photographers-a sort of magpie instinct for collecting pretty, gaudy trifles. These, if they cannot break themselves of the habit, might perhaps with greater profit take up collecting old china.": Page 15

This book is a great text on photographic lighting that I read about once a year. I strongly recommend it.

Christopher

[dwig]

Yes, the entire text of the book is available in several formats from the link. Archive.org is a great resource.

[Erez]

The adverts at the end of the book are amusing. I guess photography was always a technical sale...

[MJFerron]

I still use film and chems on a regular basis. Understand the man completely. No word substitutions on my behalf please. :)

[Tim Auger]

Not the least fascinating aspect of the frontispiece of Harrison's book is that it's evidence of the long history of the comb-over hairstyle.