Negative (photography)

“ There are various practices of doctoring the negative by using paint and other mediums on the backs, or by grinding the backs of the negatives. These are, in our opinion, all unnecessary and harmful, the remarks on retouching apply equally well here. Such artifices may easily deceive and even please the uneducated, but the artist only sees them to despise and condemn them. The technique of photography is perfect, no such botchy aids are necessary, they take the place of the putty of the bad carpenter. ”

“ But here is the point: not one of these figures which came out so strongly in the negative was visible in any form or shape to me during the time of exposure in the camera, and I vouch in the strongest manner for the fact that no one whatever had an opportunity of tampering with any plate anterior to its being placed in the dark slide or immediately preceding development. ”

“ The negative films must be as sensitive as possible to light, as they are intended to receive the shortest possible exposure, while the positive films, or the ones which correspond to the print paper in still photography, are made less sensitive to light, inasmuch as they are exposed for a longer time in the printing machine. ”

“ Actinism may then be considered as the fundamental principle, on which photography is based, and its power is exerted in forming the image on the sensitized plate in the Camera, as well as subsequently in forming or causing the impression on the sensitized paper exposed to the light beneath the negative. ”

“ PRINTING MEDIA Skilled photographers can examine a negative and can interpret its renderings with practically as much satisfaction as they get from a print, whereby a considerable amount of time can be saved in an emergency. The original glass negative should always be used when accurate measurements are to be made. These and a few other cases constitute the only use of a negative apart from its normal one, namely, for producing positive prints, usually in large numbers. ”

“ The human watcher sees merely the collapse of the human envelope; but many a phenomenon invisible to the human eye has been detected and depicted by that of the camera, as everybody knows who has the slightest acquaintance with the branch of physics known as ‘fluorescence.’ The invisible spirit of man surely falls within this category. To the crystal eye of science it is not so much invisible as elusive and intractable. Once it has fled this earth, the sovereign opportunity is gone; but photography may often intercept the actual flight of the soul. ”

“ That’s the reason the negatives themselves are better evidence than the prints from the negatives. The negatives could be tinkered so as to show fire in every window, I suppose. But the negatives themselves would show that this had been done. So many tricks can be done in photography that I don’t suppose that a photograph in itself could even be offered as proof. ”

“ You can hardly imagine how cumbrous and well-nigh hopeless a business it was in those days, not so long past, to pursue after wild life with a camera; but a thousand disheartening failures left him still grasping the inviolable shade, still confident that in photography, if it could only be given with rapidity and precision, lay the naturalist's hope. ”

“ For when everything else fails, a picture made through the photographic lens almost invariably turns the tide. However, such a picture upon which the fate of an important case may rest should be subjected to critical examination for it is an established fact that a photograph may be made as untruthful as it may be reliable. Combination photographs change entirely the character of the initial negative and have been made for the past fifty years. The earliest, simplest, and most harmless photographic deception is the printing of clouds into a bare sky. ”

“ We had a small steamer, a choppy sea, and there was a young man with a Kodak on board. I abominate amateur photographers. They are offensive. It is the fact that they insist on photography being an art that makes them so objectionable. Photography is not an art. One merely requires a good apparatus and a knowledge of how to work it, and there you are—a good photographer. ”

“ Some persons think that the requirement of darkness seems to infer trickery. Is not a dark chamber essential in the process of photography? And what would we reply to him who would say, ‘I believe photography to be a humbug—do it all in the light, and we will believe otherwise’? ”

“ It is to be feared that the hopes which are at present being built upon color-photography are doomed to like disappointment—for the simple reason that the photographic lens in no way resembles the lens of the human eye. The very fact that it is a more perfect instrument is against it. It gives us scientific facts; and scientific facts are generally artistic lies. Art has nothing to do with things as they are, but only with things as they appear to be, with the visual not the actual, with impressions, not with realities. ”

“ The mass of coloured photographs we see about are, we confess, beneath contempt; but the manner in which the artists have worked is alone accountable for their failure. The real excellence of a coloured photograph results from the artist following only the outlines which photography has given him on the paper; but the bungling dauber proceeds to destroy this beautiful drawing by painting with solid colour, which effectually hides all the wonderful delicacy of the sun’s pencil’s touch beneath. ”

“ Thus the negative, while true to Nature, reproduces everything in a reversed way; bright things are dark, and shadows appear light. For ordinary purposes, therefore, the negative has to be replaced by a new photograph made by copying it again photographically. ”

“ A picture intended to be printed from is no more a negative than another, its positive character being merely obscured by longer exposure in the camera. When first removed from the developing solution, glass pictures are negative, because they are seen upon the iodide of silver, which is a light ground. ”

“ Since spiritualists claim that the presence of invisible spirits may be detected by photography, it seems reasonable to inquire how far this is compatible with established physical facts. If a plate is wrapped in paper and submitted to “spirit influences”—whatever these may be—never being exposed in a camera at all, and on development shows faces or writing, I personally can only find one explanation—trickery. ”

“ And when I made prints from them, and the familiar home scenes and my playmates’ faces were there plainly before me, it seemed to me that the universe could hold nothing more entrancing than amateur photography. Of course I had failures, but they were few compared with the successes.
One morning in May, after I had become thoroughly versed in the art of using the camera and had fitted up a dark-room of my own in the attic, Lester and I sallied out with our cameras, for no other purpose than to secure a half-dozen snap-shots whenever desirable ones might present themselves. ”

“ Such scenes live in their loveliness only for him who has seen and harvested them: they cannot be pictured forth to another by words, nor with the painter's brush, though it be charged with tintas orientales; least of all by photography, which brings all things down to one flat, monotonous, colourless shadow of things, weary to look at. ”

“ And while the great majority of the attempts to get them prove failures, the photographer—usually an amateur-needs only to provide an avenue in front of his lens a short distance, that is free from falling flakes by the use of a shelter such as a tree or porch. The slow snapshot necessary in cloudy weather will not stop the motion of the flakes nearest the camera and these passing through greater angles of space in equal length of time than those farther away, will blur on the negative. ”

“ He laughs at the idea that any expert in England could deceive him with a faked photograph. "These [54] two negatives," he says, "are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures."
A second independent opinion is equally clear as to the genuine character of the photographs, founded upon a large experience of practical photography. ”

“ Any one who has ever dabbled in photography to the extent of shutting himself up in a tight little closet, its pitch darkness tempered slightly by a dim red glow, and dipped dark, smoky-looking pieces of glass and paper into various solutions, knows with what eagerness he waits for the blank black squares and strips to come to life, break out into spots of light, which gradually assume familiar shapes and contours. ”

“ Suffice it that to me, for many years, the only path to the Invisible has been the path of so-called spiritualism; the only lamp that illumined that path, so that all who saw might follow it for themselves, the lamp of spirit photography. It is a path with a bad name, a path infested with quacks and charlatans, and by false guides who rival the religious fanatics in the impudence of their appeal to man’s credulity. Even those who bear the lamp I hold aloft are too often jugglers and rogues, to whose wiles, unfortunately, the simple science of photography lends itself all too readily. ”

“ That history may not repeat itself, the author now hastens to assert that no self-respecting creative instinct, with the whole world of fancy at command, would care to inhibit productivity by the limitations imposed upon photography, invaluable as that science is in its place—which is not fiction. ”

“ But the hydra head of commercialism showed itself, and wood-engravers with little or no feeling for or knowledge of nature set to work turning out blocks like machines. Photography will keep these artisans from falling utterly away from nature, yet such work is harmful and of no artistic good to us, though it may please the public. Had there been no constant returns to nature (as there must always be in some measure when a photograph is used) decay would be sharp and speedy, but photography bolsters up the dying art. ”

“ Not till long later, when released from the tension of danger and abnormal endeavour, is one's mind free to develop the negative and produce a clear photograph. The sensitive freshness of the print then obtained is likely to last a lifetime. ”

“ If the negative has been over-exposed or over-developed, or both, a common error in the first attempts, it will naturally be very dense, and will demand a longer exposure, or a more powerful light, than a negative which is exposed correctly. This situation may be met either by slowing down the process of printing, or by bringing the light nearer to the film. On the other hand, if a negative is under-exposed it had better be destroyed at once, as it is worse than useless. ”

“ Naturally their faith is shaken. They feel that a man like that cannot possibly know anything about Woman or any other subject except where to go for a vegetarian lunch, and the next moment they have put down the hair-pin and the child is seven-and-six in hand and the author his ten per cent., or whatever it is, to the bad. And all because of a photograph.
For the ordinary man, the recent introduction of high-art methods into photography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the operation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was no escape for the sitter. ”

“ Far too much time, in the past, has been lost in attempting to convince those who do not believe (and those who do not want to believe) , of the genuine nature of psychic photography, and our ignorance of this phenomenon is appalling. ”

“ To a greater extent, then, the 20th century experiment with photographic prosumption, which I suppose we would call the Brownie camera, the whole Kodak experiment in populist photography. The digital photography revolution which makes the camera disappear, the darkroom disappear, the photo album disappear. It’s all virtual, right? it all exists solely in the sense that pretty much anywhere a solvent human being in one of the developed societies is, is a place where photographs can be taken, and everywhere anybody is, is a place where photographs can be viewed. ”

“ Therefore he fears the camera’s facsimile of Nature. If he allows himself to be photographed, he believes that something of himself passes into the black box, and thereafter his soul is halved of its power. ”

“ We often have food 7for reflection on the gullibility of man, when we see poor paintings and etchings exhibited at “one man” exhibitions and elsewhere, which are nothing but ruined photographs; the very drawing shows that, and the time in which such a collection of paintings is painted also hints at the method. All the drawing has been done by the photographic lens, and transferred to the panel or canvas. These are the very men who decry photography. ”

“ It was possible to produce certain modifications of the negative image as a whole, by printing it darker or lighter, or by using a harder or softer working process. Changes on the negative itself for the purpose of giving a more artistic rendering must, however, always be very carefully thought out in advance and effected by retouching, often difficult and not within the power of every photographer, or by other methods which change the negative itself. ”

“ When the reel of film has all been exposed, it is taken to the dark room, and there developed, just as a small roll from your camera would be. This film is called the negative. From it any number of positives can be made, all depending on the popularity of the subject.
To make positives, the negative film is laid on another strip of sensitive celluloid of the same size. The two films are placed in a suitable machine, and then set in front of a bright light. ”