putterings 430 < 431 > 432 index
and all the obscure places, once the focusing cloth slipped
After we took the blacksmith shop, with its blazing white walls and road, and its dark, dark water-oak tree and its dusky depths within, of a sunny morning, we concluded that a little over-exposure would have had a [49] softening, soothing effect on such exaggerated chiaroscuro. A few seconds extra exposure would have saved an hour or two puttering with a reducer. After we took any number of monotonous, palely lighted pictures, it occurred to us that a shorter exposure would have done no harm, and might have given the scene’s weak character a fillip.
And then it was that we came upon the whole subject clearly discussed, and all the obscure places illuminated by good sense...
—
ex Octave Thanet, An Adventure in Photography (1893) : 49
U Michigan copy/scan (via google books) : link
Getty Research Institute copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
—
In addition to being a treatise on amateur photographers’ mistakes (the author’s and her partner-in-crime Jane’s), the book is a strange (to put it politely) tour through the South —
“At this time we were spending the winter on an Arkansas plantation, owned jointly by my friends and a gentleman of Arkansas who manages the plantation...”
— and so there are views of buildings and woods, children and adults, whites and “negroes” encountered along the way.
“Once the focusing cloth slipped
— caption, facing page 8 : link —
and threw a pall over a cotton picking.”
Octave Thanet was the pen name of Alice French (1850-1934), popular (and lively, fluent) “local color” writer — later not so popular — with prejudices of her (and not only her) time and place; “anti-suffragist,” &c., &c.
wikipedia : link
Alice French was a figure in the “Davenport [Iowa literary] Group” whose numbers included Susan Glaspell; see putterings 362 and 364); and (for the Davenport Group), wikipedia : link
I can find little about her partner Jane Allen Crawford (1851-1932)