Picture -book: Other color processes are being developed which will open up new profit possibilities in virtually every one of the picture -book specialties covered in this book. One which is comparatively new and hardly exploited at all is the Flexichrome process, which makes it possible to produce a good color print from a black and white negative. In this process the colors are applied by hand but the final result bears no resemblance to the ordinary tinted picture -book. Rather the picture -book looks like a good color lithograph. Anyone who becomes an expert at making good Flexichrome prints probably could count on a number of years during which he would have little competition.
The best way to avoid cliches is to always try and see the familiar from an unusual angle. Some time ago I was in my dentist's chair looking at a set of large training teeth. It occurred to me that I might use them fora funny picture -book in a children's book on dentistry I was doing. I wanted a picture -book of the dentist working on teeth as seen from inside the throat, looking out over the tongue. I made a tongue out of Spam, covered the upper and lower plate with black cloth and got the dentist to drill one of the front teeth. Using a wide angle lens just behind the piece of fake tongue, I was able to photograph the dentist through the teeth. To my pleasant surprise, I got many letters from readers who had seen the picture -book in their books and wondered how I had done it. When the gas shortage hit, I did the same picture -book from inside, presumably, of a gas tank looking up the gas nozzle, past the rushing stream of gas.
For further stimulation of your imagination and of your ability to see picture -book story possibilities, refer to the chapter on magazine features in this book, which contains advice equally applicable to newspaper feature photography.
You aren't likely to get rich doing newspaper feature pictures, but you'll have a lot of fun doing them and find the work wonderful training for the much more profitable field of magazine picture -book stories.
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Photography
