International photographer (Jan-Dec 1941)

"ART" ON A MOUNTAJN TOp Back in 1928 when I was still a newsreel cameraman, the boss used to say, "Cut out the ART and get the picture!" But, after all, I thought, what was the use of studying all over Europe ( there was one then ) the art of the great masters unless I found an outlet for the knowledge I was sopping ? It seems I was in the wrong end of up the game, so I cut the news and strove for | art. Sketching and painting were slow for !,my temperament, but color intrigued me. In 1930 I was back in Europe shooting travelogues in color, thus having a lot of fun combining my studies with actual practice. All the patterns, balance, forms and curves provided by Nature, from the floor of the desert to the highest mountain tops, and the habitation upon them, were '. the subjects painted by my camera. And i the top of a mountain was one of my most recent subjects, animated with the flying ! feet of a dozen expert skiiers. Leon C. Shelly, who produced the novel travel film "Beautiful British Columbia," , sent for me to produce his latest, one on sports. Having just finished four other color shorts on sporting events for Del Frazier at Warner Bros. I guess Mr. Shelly thought I must be in such fine fettle that he need not explain exactly what the sport was to be. All I knew was that he had some snow stuff in mind. I thought we would drive out in his car to some snowy location, set up, shoot, and rush back to the hotel and re lax. That was about the speed with which we shot each sequence last summer and aforesaid reel of "Beautiful British Columbia" ended up with 187 such snappy scenes, more or less artistic, depending upon whether you and the audience like my style of art with a color camera. With black and white we grab ourselves the various films we want, a flock of filters from the palest yellows to deep brown, reds that compete with the spectrum, diffusers of our choice and a lot of burned gauzes, as well as other colored filters and graduates. In color we are really beginning to do the same thing. Personally, still striving for that art, I utilize practically as many pieces of glass and cloth as do many of the camera gentry of the major studios of Hollywood. It doesn't make a bit of difference as to the color process being used. For example, on many scenes of "Beautiful British Columbia" I had as many as four elements of glass and cloth in front of the lens. My pet is a neutral density polaroid disk that Land, the Boston inventor, made for me back in Boston when I shot a "Popular Science" subject of his business, Polaroid. There is no color at all in this disk and it is one of the best color gadgets available for color shooting when the angles of light International Photographer for May, 1941 and shooting prove right by visual check. With experience it is easy to know the best times of day the sun angles for Polaroid so that the artist can get the utmost "painting" with this aid. This, combined with other filters to balance the exposure in scene and sky, another to correct for the color of daylight, plus gauzing for edges where sharp tree branches might give one ocular lacerations, really brings out the most beautiful aspects of a particularly pleasing composition. At least it pleases the photographer, and if many who see it are pleased you get a slow elation of not having wasted years of art study with pencil and brush. We know that all nature is beautiful, but the photographer who really can lay claim to being an artist is the one who chooses for the composition of his scene that most beautiful position and angle from which to shoot. Then he selects that lens which will gather in the greatest amount of beauty in the compositional limitations of the Academy projection aperture limits. My camera has a ground glass which shows me exactly what the projection screen area is going to be. Thus I see on the ground glass exactly what the audience is going to enjoy or reject. So . . . in my search for beauty . . . and beauty is my business, I answered the call of Shelly and hopped a train for Canada. Too late I found out that our location was the top of a mountain ! We had to climb it, Mt. Revelstoke, up near the Canadian Rockies, a climb of five miles to 6500 feet at the summit. There was a chalet where we were to live ... we had to pack the equipment on our backs . . . and make it By Ray Fernstrom on skiis. I hadn't been on skiis since I was a kid. What a herringbone, or reasonably accurate facsimile. I pounded into the upward path of that mountain ! After eight hours we finally made it. Wolfing supper, I went to bed and slept like a pretzel until dawn. Awakened by "Come and get it," I joined the galloping throng in to breakfast, but my gallop was more the waddle of a sidewinder. I felt as if I'd slept with skiis, pack and poles on. Breakfast was good and the scenes through each window the most magnificent picture material ever laid before me. The snow-capped Canadian Rockies, balsam trees ( picture trees, I called them last year), now heavily laden with thick new snow, all against a gorgeous blue sky and fleecy clouds here, thunderheads there. Dessert before breakfast. The temperature outside was near zero, so I had to wash the oil out of the camera. Naturally one never takes equipment into warm rooms, so no difficulty was experienced at any time in regard to the camera. We rigged a skii sled for toting the outfit about the top and upper slopes, but the boys had a hard time of it. Skiis did not work while towing or pushing the sled, so we tried snow shoes. Without these we sank to our hips through the crust. Shelly, the producer, is an expert skiier and raved about the snow as being the most perfect he'd ever seen for sport. To me it was all pretty pictures. Art came easy at first. We worked slowly away from the chalet, shooting in all directions as paintings presented themselves. All we had to do was animate them with (Contnuied on page 12) Ray Fernstrom and producer Leon C. Shelly