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Photography by Day and by Night 



enough to cause an explosion. I myself, as well as others, 

 have had some very narrow escapes whilst thus occupied, 

 and, as every photographer knows, the work has had 

 fatal results in several instances of recent years. 



My apparatus revealed several shortcomings even in the 

 improved form. It was not absolutely light-proof, and 

 it had to be set up always, for its automatic operation, in 

 the brief tropical dusk. If no animal presented itself for 

 portraiture the plates exposed were always wasted, unless 

 at dawn they were withdrawn again. (This is not the 

 case with the apparatus as since perfected.) 



Many wrong impressions are current in regard to 

 this kind of photography. It can be managed in two 

 ways. Either the photographer himself remains on the 

 spot to attend in person both to the flashlight and the 

 exposure, or else the mechanism is worked by a string 

 against which the animal moves. Before I took my 

 photographs I had been a spectator of all the various 

 incidents represented in them, watching them all from 

 hiding-places in dense thorn-bushes, thus coming, as it 

 were, into personal touch with lions and other animals. 

 Though not so dangerous really as camping out on 

 the velt, where one's fatigue and the darkness leave one 

 defenceless against the possible attacks of elephants or 

 rhinoceroses, you need good nerves to spend the night in 

 your thorn-thicket hiding-place with a view to flashlight 

 snapshots of lions at close quarters. In that interesting 

 work Zu den Atilikans, by Count Hoyos, and in Count 

 Wickenburg's Wander ungeji in Vstafrika, the reader will 

 find interesting and authentic accounts of night-shoots 



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