Alfred Horsley Hinton

Art seeks ever to conceal the means by which its effects are produced and the method in which the work is wrought.

The moment the eye perceives that the picture is produced by other than the professed means, the effect, the appeal to the imagination, is disturbed.

The texture of the printed image is of such peculiar character that neither brush or liquid paint seem capable of imitating it.

Both with the negative in position and subsequently without it, every part of a large print is, maybe, thus printed in, piece by piece, a large print often occupying me two or three days.

...let it be remembered that as photography is our chosen medium, then if photography unaided will give us the effect we want there is no especial virtue in altering it.

In such a picture the artist may depart from actual fact, from what actually was, so long as he does not exceed what might have been.

He (the photographer) has practically created a new thing out of materials gathered from nature; upon a foundation of fact he has allowed his imagination to build up an entirely fictitious scene, and the truth of the effect will depend …

Probably every photographer has at times found it convenient to print one part of a negative more than another or lias covered another portion during printing, thus deliberately making those portions lighter or darker, as the case may be.

The objection to the shiny, highly polished surface of albumen and gelatine papers is that, besides the fact that the surface reflects false and disturbing lights, the very polish and gloss has an artificial appearance which, from its very …

But the quality of the result obtained by using a pin-hole to which its advocates attach most importance is the suppression of sharp focus over the whole image, no one plane being more sharply focused than another.

The chief characteristic of the pin-hole photograph is that we get a general suppression of focus in all parts the picture is nowhere quite sharp.

As a rule, in pictorial photography a long-focus lens will on the whole be most satisfactory.

We know the mountain peaks are lofty, and we think of them so, and we mentally enlarge them, but not the cottage at their foot, or the trees half way up.

With most of us, even without special training, there is a certain instinctive sense of proportion, and thus we recognize the relative distance of objects by their relative size.

...strictly speaking, tone is the relative lightness and darkness due to the effect of light governed by atmosphere, and has nothing to do with the relative lightness and darkness or relative value with which various colours appear when …

It must be remembered that after all in making a picture we are endeavoring to set down on one plane various objects in such a way as to suggest an infinitude of varying planes, and hence we are justified in selecting such conditions of …

Very great care should then be taken to see that distant objects are rendered so as to appear distant that is, in correct relative tone when compared with the foreground or nearer portions.

...he (a photographer) forgets that unless he has learnt when the tones of a picture are right or not, he will not know whether his work is good or bad, nor know what to try and overcome in future.

Photography itself may err by inaccurately rendering the relative tones in Nature. Then we shall have to ask, What is " Tone "?...

… to put it into slightly different form, it is not the facts in nature that the good picture aims at portraying, but the effects of light and shade accompanied by a pleasing arrangement.

The prettiest or most interesting prospect may lack the conditions which awaken our emotions, and, lacking the essentials of the picture, must be passed by.

Hence SELECTION in photography, or at least in landscape and some other branches of work, often takes the place of what in painting becomes voluntary COMPOSITION.

The desire to see for the sake of seeing is with most people the only desire to be gratified; hence the delight in detail.

The composition may be ever so carefully worked out, but it must appear unconsciously done. And so it will be best in most cases to depart slightly from precise and symmetrical arrangement, as though unintentionally, lest the endeavor to …