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Smaller Negative: Most of your work will be for professional photographers. Amateurs haven't the same incentive to pay a dollar or two for each negative, and anyway, most of them use smaller negative film than is practical to retouch. Except in special cases, you should decline to work on negatives smaller negative than 4x5.
Do you like to take your Camera out on a fine day, when bright clouds decorate a deep blue sky, and shoot pictures purely for their pictorial beauty? Have you done this with the beauty spots in and around your own town, just for the artistic satisfaction you get out of such pictures? If so, you probably have a stock of negatives in your files right now which could start producing a steady income for you.
5. Never be too proud to reshoot a poor negative. Did you make an error in exposure? Did your tripod slip and cause a fuzzy negative? Or did you make one of the other dozens of errors which can almost but not quite ruin a negative? If so, do not try to cover up by struggling with the negative by means of darkroom trickery, but instead shoot the picture over again if that is at all possible. To reshoot is to confess a measure of failure to "your client, of course, but you can make up for that by going all-out for a masterpiece on your second try.
To take these small portraits, Disderi first made a wet-plate negative with a special Camera that had four lenses and a plateholder that could be slid from side to side. Four exposures were made on each half of the plate; thus eight poses could be taken on one negative. A single print from this negative could then be cut up into eight separate portraits. Unskilled labor was used for this work; the production of the cameraman and printer was thus increased eightfold. |
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