50 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



I made several really remarkable pictures of birds 

 perching or feeding on the sills outside. 



That spring, with the first dove of March, I went 

 afield. I spent over a thousand dollars in equip- 

 ment. All of the money accumulated from nature 

 articles and a few stories went to pay for four 

 cameras, each adapted to a different branch of 

 outdoor work, also a small wagonload of field 

 paraphernalia. I transformed the downstairs bath- 

 room into a dark-room and used the kitchen sink 

 for plate and print washing. These arrangements 

 were extremely inconvenient and uncomfortable, 

 as shutting out all light excluded air in summer and 

 heat in winter; but I soon made prints which 

 brought a prominent man of the Eastman Kodak 

 Company to investigate my methods. He frankly 

 admitted that their experts at the factory were not 

 making as good prints on their paper as some I had 

 sent them. I owned a Kodak, but as a rule all of my 

 best negatives were on plates exposed in cameras. I 

 did not subject the gentleman to the shock of show- 

 ing him that my dark-room was the family bath, 

 my washing tanks the turkey and meat platters in 

 the kitchen sink. I first mastered the mechanism 

 of my equipment, studied good works on photog- 

 raphy and experimented with compounding chem- 

 icals and developing and fixing plates, and then 

 the difficult processes of print making. At this 

 time I was doing all of the work in the thirteen- 



room Cabin, except the washing, and was making 



f 



