INTRODUCTION 19 



reduction gear of changeable speed, each flower sub- 

 ject an unknown problem, as regards time of open- 

 ing, speed of growth, size at maturity, combined 

 with elements of photography, lighting and correct 

 exposure, the after treatment of negative and print 

 and combining all of these and many others to get 

 an artistic, pleasing result. In the forthcoming chap- 

 ters I am going to endeavor to tell you how each one 

 was handled, how the picture was painted. 



My photographic experience when I commenced 

 my flower work in 1912 was varied. As a student at 

 Stanford University, where my "Major" was me- 

 chanical engineering, where President Hoover was 

 a classmate, I snapped with the smallest box kodak, 

 a class rush, making sixty good pictures in that ex- 

 citing hour. Over two thousand of these tiny solio 

 prints were sold. That led to larger cameras a 4x5, 

 then an x 10 plate camera that had been taken for 

 a debt; the bellows leaked, it had no shutter. I 

 patched the bellows, designed and built a shutter 

 which gave the foreground, where it is needed, more 

 time than the sky. It worked wonderfully well, and 

 was worthy of mechanical refinements, and present- 

 day use. Then I got the idea of a panorama camera, 

 which my professors said would not work that the 

 idea was wrong that the image would blur with a 

 moving lens. I went ahead with the idea, designed 



