Facing The Camera: He broke the lens and had to make a new camera, smaller in size-about 11A inches on each side-because the only other lens he had was from his solar microscope and consequently of short focal length. He wrote his brother on May 5, 1816:
I placed the apparatus in the room where I work, facing the bird-house and the open window.
A too-close viewpoint gives the features nearest the lens an appearance of unbecoming grossness. In a picture with the subject facing the camera, for instance, the nose and chin are made to look larger than they really are, the eyes smaller than normal, and the ears unnaturally far away from the front of the face. Nothing could be more unflattering than such a caricature which retains the resemblance but destroys the symmetry of the features.
Containing the New Optical Laws of the Camera Obscura or Daguerreotype, demonstrated that converging perpendiculars of the Camera image were indeed mathematically correct and concluded: "Art has always represented objects geometrically, or as they cannot be seen in the perpendicular and visually, or as they can be seen in the horizontal direction."3 But his findings were ignored. Indeed, amateurs were warned in manuals and instruction books never to tip the camera. Many hand cameras were even equipped with levels to assure the viewer that he was holding the Camera horizontally.
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Photography
