Amateur Photographer & Cinematographer (1933)

The AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER © 6 CINEMATOGRAPHER o October 18th, 1933 in Every week an article will appear under this heading dealing with a topic of interest to the novice in photography. COMPETITION SLIDES. NOTES L NOTIONS Jor the LESS ADVANCED WORKER IT has often been pointed out that it is as easy to make a lantern slide as a bromide or gaslight print. The procedure is almost identical. Given good negatives it often happens that slides from them are better than prints. No print can rival a good slide in luminosity and brilliance. But while it is easy enough, with practice, to produce first-rate technical slides, it by no means follows that the results are suitable for competition purposes. I will try to explain the requirements for a slide to give it a reasonable chance of being accepted or of scoring an award in a goodclass competition. To begin with, it may be regarded as an impossibility to make a perfect slide except from a perfect negative. There must be no perceptible flaws of any kind in the negative, which must have a range of tones suitable to the subject. A small flaw in the negative becomes a big blemish on the screen ; deficiency or falsity in the tones becomes more apparent when the image is greatly enlarged. The pro¬ jection of a slide provides the most severe and searching test to which the photographer’s work can be subjected. The very colour of a slide is important — not the colour as it appears in the slide itself, but as it looks on the screen, which may be a very different matter. Good blacks — not rusty or greenish— are satisfactory ; so are cool and warm browns, and the beautiful greys and blues obtainable with thiocarbamide. Foxy reds, crude blues and greens are nearly without exception fatal. Further, the colour should be appropriate to the subject. A warm brown handicaps a snow scene ; a blue-grey kills a sunshine effect. The beginner who can produce only certain colours in his slides should avoid those subjects which they do not suit. Masking is also important. As a rule this is best done with four strips of opaque paper, which must have perfectly clean-cut edges, and form an accurate rectangle. Every¬ thing outside the complete subject should be masked out. Oval and circular masks do occasionally enclose a compo¬ sition to advantage, but very rarely. Rounded corners should be ruled out ; they are a relic of the days when lenses did not cover properly, so that there were dark comers to be concealed. The rectangle of the mask should be properly placed in the area of the slide. The illustrations suggest how a horizontal and a vertical subject may be arranged. In all cases the side margins should be equal. If the top and bottom margins are unequal the latter should be the wider. The illustrations also show the correct position of the " spots ” — one at each side of the top when the subject is looked at as it will appear on the screen. These spots are generally round — punched out of white paper ; but it is a simple matter to make them square by cutting a strip of paper and snipping sections off. I have long discarded the use of white paint or ink for making the spots or writing on the masks. I found that in time this had a tendency to become powdery, and particles were liable to get shaken off into the picture space. If anything is to be written 1 4 353