A Manual of Photography: Intended As a Text Book for Beginners and a Book of Reference for Advanced Photographers.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1868 Excerpt: ...and at the same time supports it by lending firmness and foundation to it. Too much attention to this point cannot be given by the landscapist, who will, however, often have his patience and ingenuity taxed to the uttermost to find anything like a satisfactory foreground to his pictures. The Distance. The distance should never find its place exactly in the middle of the picture, which by such a disposition becomes divided, as it were, into two equal halves. A peculiar pleasure is given when the eye is conducted from the foreground to the distance by lines of direction. These lines may be one or both banks of a river or stream, a picturesque road, or other object. The leading should be rather by broken and diversified lines than by straight ones. A certain pleasure is communicated when objects in the middle distance are repeated in the farther distance. Such a repetition is not to be by the same object, but rather by some other object in strict keeping. This rule is closely allied to one in painting. It is laid down in painting that if a particular color be introduced in one place only, it has the effect of a spot or blot; the color must be carried through the picture, or at least part of it, by recurring here and there. As in colors, so in objects. If trees are seen in the foreground or middle distance, the eye is gratified by seeing them reappear in the distance. If a cottage or other building be a conspicuous object in the foreground, the eye likes to see something similar in the distance. The effect of a high light in the extreme distance is greatly enhanced by placing a dark object in the foreground directly under it. This acts partly by throwing the distance farther back, and partly because the light becomes lighter and the darkness darker through cont...