The ferrotype and how to make it - The Grian Press

124 THE FERROTYPE.
to separate and to test for purity the various
chemicals and solutions used in the photographic
atelier. It is necessary that we should under-
stand intimately the qualities of nitrate of silver,
its changes under the action of light, and how to
facilitate that action, and render it certain and
permanent. These and a great many more of the
principles of our art we may be perfectly familiar
with,—tlianks to the untiring diligence with which
researches on those subjects have been conducted
by photographic experimentalists, and to the gen-
eral diffusion of such knowledge in works on
chemistry and the current photographic publica-
tions, but very little is written or said about the
aesthetics of photography. The one should have
and has been done, but the other should not have
been left luidone.
Photographers generally are a wide-awake class,
and know the importance and necessity of study,
and they undoubtedly make good use of the ad-
vantages they possess in acquainting themselves
with the exigencies of the situation ; it is, there-
fore, reasonable to suppose that had they pos-
sessed equal advantages for the study of illumina-
tion and the pose, the artistic helps to our art, as
they have had for that which relates to the more
scientific portions, there would have been a sooner
awakening to the fact that every effort has been
put forth seemingly with a view to make pho-
tography equivalent to an exact science; that is,
a photography of arbitrary rules and laws, rather