PHOTOGRAPHYPictorial Photography
FIVE
The accompanying photograph entitled “The Lake, Winter,” illustrates admirably the use of the soft-focus lens. It is also of interest as showing the advantages sometimes to be gained from the intentional use of defects. The normal human eye is unsurpassed for the purpose for which it is designed; it is difficult to imagine an organ more perfect in this respect. The eye automatically, and almost instantaneously, adjusts itself for near or distant objects and for varying intensities of light, and has, moreover, a field of view of nearly 180 degrees—almost a complete half-circle. Nevertheless, it has two defects that tend to impair the accuracy of vision, namely, chromatic and spherical aberration. Chromatic aberration is the inability to focus simultaneously on two or more of the primary colors (it is this defect in the eye that causes red letters to seem to stand out from a blue or green background, a trick sometimes used in poster work). Spherical aberration is the inability to bring to a focus the rays of light that pass through the lens near the margins at the same time as those that pass through near the center. For these reasons—and, in lesser degree, some others—the eye cannot see sharp lines, and a lens that gives sharp definition to the edges of objects produces results that are esthetically unpleasing, because foreign to our experience. The soft-focus lens—of which there are numerous makes—is so designed that it possesses the errors that are normal to the eye, and therefore—if the characteristic softness of definition is not over-done by a too enthusiastic worker—gives results having an agreeable vagueness of outline. At one time the qualities of this type of lens were over-worked, the results being so excessively diffused that, as one writer said of a print, “it was impossible to tell whether it was a ‘Portrait of a Lady’ or a ‘Water-Spout in the Gulf Stream.’” But for some years past the pendulum has been swinging the other way, and photographers in general (it must be understood that this refers only to artistic workers, not scientists) are now using the unconnected lens so as to secure as nearly as possible the quality characteristic of the normal eye with, perhaps, a slight exaggeration for the sake of suggestion, and as a stimulus to the imagination.
WRITTEN FOR THE MENTOR BY PAUL L. ANDERSONILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 6, No. 12, SERIAL No. 160COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KARL STRUSS, BY COURTESY OF HARPER’S BAZAAR.PHOTOGRAPH ILLUSTRATION FOR A STORY
PHOTOGRAPH BY KARL STRUSS, BY COURTESY OF HARPER’S BAZAAR.
PHOTOGRAPH ILLUSTRATION FOR A STORY