4 WILD LIFE AT HOME. 



that of hearing, and the man who can work with 

 the least noise will, as a rule, get the best results. 

 Our silent shutter is permanently fixed between 

 the lens and the body of the camera. It is one 

 of Thornton and Pickard's, and works very satis- 

 factorily, although I have occasionally known even 

 its slight grating sound when opened make a brood- 

 ing bird cock her head on one side in the attitude 

 of listening, and, of course, spoil the plate. 



Many animals are so full of vitality and move- 

 ment that they are never still long enough in any 

 attitude for the photographer's brain to commu- 

 nicate with his hand, arid his hand with the air- 

 ball controlling the silent shutter, and yet leave a 

 sufficient margin of time in which to expose a plate 

 upon them. For such subjects we use a focal-plane 

 shutter, which is fixed at the back of the camera, 

 and works at from one-twentieth to a thousandth 

 part of a second. 



Where the camera needs to be carefully hidden 

 as in the case of photographing wild rabbits 

 outside their burrows, or water-voles on a river's 

 bank, and worked from a distance with the 

 operator as little exposed as possible we employ 

 a hundred feet of gutta-percha tubing, about a 

 quarter of an inch in outside diameter, and joined 

 in five or six places by hollow pieces of metal. 

 The value of these is that they enable the photo- 

 grapher to use any length of tubing demanded by 

 circumstances, and it must be borne in mind that 



