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HOME HANDICRAFT 367
cloudless sky, it looks as bright as it does when it is several hours old. But the color of the light is really yellow and red, although it doesn't seem so unless there are white clouds for the light to shine on, when we have yellow or red sunrises or —the same thing applies to the other end of the day—red or yellow sunsets.
Now, red and yellow are two of the slowest colors to make any impression on the photographic film or plate. They require more time to make their impress; consequently, when the sunlight is mostly composed of red and yellow rays—to speak accurately, when the red and yellow rays of sunlight are the principal ones to reach the earth—it takes more time to make a picture, and so, generally speaking, snapshots with our little fixed focus box and relatively slow lens are impossible. In winter time, in latitudes of the United States and England, at least, the sun is so much farther south than in summer, and its rays strike the earth at so much more acute an angle and thus give so much larger a proportion of the red and yellow or non-actinic rays, that snapshotting has to be put off until later in the day to counteract the impoverished condition of the light.
Time Exposures
But just because you cannot take snapshots early and late in the shade, is no reason why you cannot take photographs. Such pictures are made by what is called a time exposure; that is, light is allowed to reach the film through the lens during an appreciable interval of time.
Making a time exposure is, of course, a matter of judgment as to the value of the light at hand. There is absolutely no short cut to this knowledge that I know of.
However, there are tentative suggestions which may be of some value. In making your first interior time exposure, pick out a bright room with two or more windows, and point the camera away from the windows, so that the windows are not in the view. Have them all wide open as to shutters and screens and roller shades. Have the camera on a table, chair or tripod support. It should not be necessary, but experience |
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