PHOTOGRAPHY 59 



school use, have plain covers. Design is the rule, and 

 not the exception. Consider, then, the applicability of 

 the thousand and one natural ideas for book-covers ; 

 note how well the oak-leaf, the acorn, the violet, the 

 pansy, the dandelion, the maple-seed, or " samara," 

 the cherry, the chestnut and an almost infinite exten- 

 sion of these familiar objects will adapt themselves to a 

 relatively conventional treatment for design. 



A decision should be made at the beginning of the 

 designing effort as to whether the attempt will be to 

 use the branch, twig or cluster as a whole, or to take 

 the flowers, pods, acorns, or whatever the motive be, for 

 separate conventionalizing. Thus, is the book-cover to 

 show a rose cluster, with leaves, buds and flowers, or is 

 it to be an arrangement in separated buds or flowers 

 alone ? 



The violet scheme shown on page 57 is a hint 

 for the use of comparatively small flowers. While the 

 field of design precludes nothing that is agreeably 

 decorative, it will be found that the usual cluster or 

 bunching arrangement is hardly applicable. Laying out 

 the subjects — violets, for instance — in that regularity 

 of form called conventional, will probably be found 

 more agreeable. 



Just here may well be given a few 

 th'" w k points on the way to proceed. Let us 

 presume that it is a book-cover of the 

 size of the ordinary duodecimo novel we are designing, 

 and that we are working with clover-heads, which we 

 propose to reduce to two-thirds natural size ; that also 

 the camera is on the vertical stand, and the plate-glass 

 exposing platform is before us. We first arrange a limit 

 of size, either by cutting out a properly proportioned 

 rectangle* from a sheet of pasteboard of any character, 



*A simple means of obtaining proper proportion is to add 

 to length and width in equal ratio. If the design desired is 

 to be 4x6 inches, the "lay-out" may be 6 x 9 inches, which 

 will "photograph down" to 4x6 by one-third reduction. 

 Or, if a diagonal line be drawn from, say, the lower left to 

 the upper right corner of the book-cover rectangle, the point 

 at which the upper right corner of any larger or smaller 

 rectangle intersects this line will give exact proportion. 



