THE CAMERA 



345 



(Written in the Autumn.) 



The autumn is at hand and the gor- 

 geous cloak of nature is now in evi- 

 dence. We now have a new problem 

 in photography and a word or two on 

 color value may not be amiss. Pro- 

 vide yourself with a ray-filter of good 

 quality and a box of color-sensitive 

 plates. The latter plates are obtain- 

 able at any up-to-date stock-house for 

 photographic supplies, and may be pur- 

 chased in two grades, one sensitive for 

 yellows and greens and the other, for 

 all colors, including the reds. 



The human eye has the happy fac- 

 ulty, as evidenced by the worker in 

 monochrome, of translating the color 

 values of the various colors into a scale 

 of luminosity. Thus when he repre- 

 sents blue he generally shows it darker 

 than yellow, whereas yellow is repre- 

 sented light. The white cloud on a blue 

 sky would be distinctly shown by the 

 sketch artist, but the camera picture 

 usually shows no clouds at all, and in 

 many cases shows a light red as though 

 it were black and a deep blue, which is 

 a dark color to the eye may be almost 

 the same tone as the whites of the pic- 

 tures. This "color blindness" of plate 



makes the ordinary photograph of an 

 autumn landscape a dismal failure. 

 The scarlet maples and yellow oaks, 

 which stand out in a blaze of splendor 

 in contrast to the sombre evergreens of 

 the hillsides are completely buried in a 

 monotone in the negative. 



Now by selecting the proper plate 

 which should be a Seed L Ortho or a 

 Cramer-Iso for the early foliage and a 

 Seed Panchromatic or a Cramer Tri- 

 chromatic for the russet brown and 

 red types, we can easily overcome our 

 difficulties. Our negative becomes a 

 thing of beauty and every delicate tone 

 of color-luminosity is rendered, especi- 

 ally where we employ the ray-filter. 

 The latter device deprives the plate of 

 the excess of blue light and even shows 

 the gradation in the sky from the 

 lighter horizon zones to the darker por- 

 tions more nearly overhead. 



There are many little wrinkles in 

 photography, as in other matters which 

 are so familiar to the expert and to the 

 manufacturer, that nobody ever men- 

 tions them nor do they appear in direc- 

 tion sheets. One of these is the fact 

 that ray-filter shifts the focus of every 

 lens, and for this reason, you should 



A PHOTOGRAPH BY THE GERMAN MAKE OF PROTAR. 

 By Brown Broth < 



