Page 31 - The Wellington photographic handbook

WELLINGTON Iso-Speedy Plates.

It is not every photographer who is satisfied with the rendering
of colours given by plates of the ordinary or non-isochromatic
kinds. Everyone knows that certain colours are said to "
photo-
graph light " and others to " photograph dark." Blue, especially
a pure blue, will seem very much lighter in a photograph than it
is in reality, while yellow, red and green will often photograph
very much darker than they appear to the eye.
No
We may have two objects side by side, a red and a blue.
one looking at them could doubt for a moment that the blue was
much darker than the red, yet in the photograph the blue may
seem much the lighter. In the same way, a person's skin may
be smooth, and to the eye may appear very much the same tint
all over, yet actually there may be, in fact there often are, faintly
visible yellow or reddish freckles;
and when such a person is
photographed, these freckles—on account of their colour—appear
very strongly in the print.
Much retouching is necessitated by this
peculiarity of ordinary plates.
In landscape work, a great deal of the
beauty of many pictures is due to the different shades of green
in the foliage, and to the masses of white cloud against the deep
blue of the sky. An ordinary plate renders the greens too much
alike, and all of them too dark, while the blue of the sky is rendered
no darker, and sometimes even lighter, than the white clouds.
In copying paintings, and in the photography of flowers, the same
difficulties are met with.
All this takes its origin in the fact that ordinarily a plate is
not sensitive to red, is only slightly sensitive to yellow or green,
and
is quite disproportionately sensitive to blue and to
violet!
The WELLINGTON Iso-Speedy Plates have been treated in
a special manner to overcome this defect.
It should here be pointed out that it is by no means every
Many
subject that is the worse for this defect of ordinary plates.
photographers hold that for all ordinary subjects, portraits, land-
scapes and architecture, an isochromatic plate is not an advantage.
They claim that there is a certain " quality " about the results
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