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THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. EDITED BX T- C- HEPWORTH, F-C.S- Vol. XXXV. No. 1727.—October 9, 1891. CONTENTS. PAGE On Photographing Distant Objects 697 Electric Currents in Development. By Col. J. Waterhouse, S.C., Assistant Surveyor-General of India 698 Universal Microscopic Exhibition at Antwerp 700 Photography in Germany. By Hermann E. Gunther 701 The China Camera Club 702 Notes 704 The Exhibition at Pall Mall 705 PAGE An Electric Glow-Lamp for Photographers 706 Autumnal Foliage and. Orthochromatic Plates 707 Amsterdam International Photographic Exhibition 708 Incandescent Gas-lights. 709 Patent Intelligence 710 Correspondence 710 Proceedings of Societies 711 Answers to Correspondents 712 ON PHOTOGRAPHING DISTANT OBJECTS. The tyro in photography is generally disappointed with the first results which he obtains in landscape work. He attempts too much, and anticipates a result which his apparatus is incapable of giving. Of course a great deal of this non-success is due to his natural difficulty of interpreting the lovely coloured image on his focussing screen into monochrome as it will appear in the completed photograph. He does not understand how all those varied shades of green will merge them selves into blacks and greys, nor does he at once appre ciate how the .picture before him will suffer in the absence of the sapphire sky shot with delicate fleecy clouds. In a word, he wants experience to teach him the value of a given landscape from a photographic point of view. Another disappointment comes to him in the dwarfing of the principal objects in his picture. The church tower on the hill yonder, with the farm home steads nestled under its shadow, the sleepy hollow in the middle distance, and the sunset sky dominating the whole, make up a fine picture. But in the photo graph, church, houses, and. hill have somehow sunk into one straight line, and form very insignificant ob jects in a view which seems to have an undesirable expanse of foreground and sky. The church, instead of being a couple of hundred yards away, has receded to a mile or more, and the meadow in which the camera was placed has apparently quadrupled its acreage. The more experienced worker is careful to avoid these difficulties. He has long ago learnt that all that glitters is not photographic gold, that he must not be led away by the charm of mere colour, and that a single lens of long focus is, for landscape work, very often a far more desirable tool to work with than a short-focus rectilinear lens of the most expensive brand. But occasionlly the better informed photographer is in want of extra aid in the portrayal of objects which are so placed that he cannot approach near enough to them to get a picture of the size he wants. It may be a building on the farther side of a river, or one which it is desirable to photograph from a certain window which is too distant from it to yield a picture of the desired dimensions. We can imagine a case occurring to a war correspondent in which it is necessary to obtain a picture of a distant fort, while it is impossible to approach it without personal risk. A man in such a position would examine the distant object through his telescope, and would long for some means whereby the image as seen in that instrument might be rendered permanent. Perhaps he would not readily imagine that, by combining the telescope with his photographic lens, this could be actually achieved ; but with certain precautions this can be done, as anyone can ascertain experimentally for himself. Such photographs have indeed been taken from time to time, and there is no doubt that they would be far more common than they are if it were not for the fact that the necessary exposure is so long that the method must be confined to the representation of inanimate things. Those who wish to experiment in this direction will find that the best method of procedure is to fix the camera and telescope on a rigid board. The former can easily be supported in two uprights foimed like the letter X, the cylindrical body of the glass bedding itself firmly into the upper angles of such supports. The telescope must, of course, be central with the photographic lens—a rectilinear is perhaps the best form to employ—and the junction between the two must be furnished with a velvet sleeve, so that no light enters the camera except through the combined optical arrangement. The image given will be an erect one if the telescope is of the astronomical form ; but if it is a terrestrial telescope, the photographic lens will once more invert the erect image which it gives when used alone. As already indicated, the image is very dark, and, when seen on the ground glass, gives the same impression as one would when observed with an ordi nary lens stopped down to its smallest aperture; so , that the necessary exposure is increased from the fraction of a second, which it would be under normal | conditions, to half a minute or more.
