Motion picture photography (1927)

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DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGATIVE they may have learned by rule of thumb how to obtain good pictures but to save their lives they could not give the reasons for what they do. Also there are many false or erroneous ideas prevalent about exposure and development. One of the most pernicious of these false ideas is that an under-exposed negative can be "brought up" by special methods of development. Another is that different times of exposure require different methods of development. The truth is that the best development for under-, correct, and over-exposure is the same in each case. The man who sets out to get a good negative every time will find that he has much to learn about development, and perhaps quite as much to unlearn. It has always been regarded as the critical stage in the making of the negative, an intermediate state where wonderful things could be done by those who knew how — "an art," as Bothamley said, "not reducible to a matter of figures." Hence the usual way of mastering development was to get this or that famous worker's formulae and method, and on that empirical foundation build one's own methods by experience. But, as Poor Richard told us long ago: Experience keeps a dear school. We are beginning to be wiser. The investigations of Hurter and Driffield plainly show that "the production of the photograph is governed by natural laws, and a definite effect must result from a definite cause. The same cause, under the same conditions, always produces the same effect. Only by clearly grasping and working in harmony with these laws can we really become masters of technical photography." Our first step, then is to seek that scientific knowledge which is a knowledge of things in their causes: to know, for instance, the law governing light-action. Let us begin. When we make a photograph, our purpose is simple: to secure a record of some object of interest. The positive, then is the real end of all our photography. The negative is chiefly valuable or interesting as a means to the end, an intermediate step toward the positive — nothing more. Unless we get in the positive a record which truthfully describes the object photographed as the eye saw it, all our negative-making is in vain. Many photographs are untruthful in their rendering of tone, misrepresenting the light and shade of the subject as seen by the eye. The reason why so many of our photographs fail to satisfy is here discovered ; they do not give us the natural gradations of 141