Focus The Camera And Snap: The big money in straight commercial photography comes from jobs where the photographer either shoots a large number of negatives or where a large number of prints are ordered. Smaller jobs are really profitable only when they can be done in the studio, where it is the work of a minute to turn on the lights, focus the Camera and snap the picture, using a standard Lighting arrangement and a standard exposure.
She blundered her way through technique, resorting to any means to get desired effects. The blurred, out-of-focus images that many critics deplored were deliberate. She wrote to her friend Sir John Herschel that she hoped to elevate her art beyond
mere conventional topographic Photography-map making & skeleton rendering of feature & form without that roundness & fulness of force & feature that modelling of flesh & limb which the focus I use only can give tho' called & condemned as "out of focus'' What is focus-& who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus-My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry & Beauty-,19.
The Camera was loadf with twelve plates that were changed by pulling out at pushing in a brass rod. A sliding, spring-operated shu ter worked at a speed of 1/60 of a second. The lens w; set at fixed focus; Carpentier stated that photographe were incapable of focusing accurately enough to perm sharp enlargements to be made. A fixed-focus enlarg was sold as an accessory: he boasted that with it "tl original negatives are easily increased to Vi-plate si [61/2 x 434 in.]-a matter of considerable moment operators making views for practical purposes."
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Photography
