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Curt Negative: This freedom for fun and frustration is all right, even thrilling, if you're sure you can take it. I remember once arriving at Montpellier, in southern France, at 11:30 P.M. I tried twelve hotels and got the same curt negative, varying from sleepy to cross, from twelve night clerks. On the thirteenth try, when desperation was setting in, I managed to get a cot in the garret of a third-class establishment.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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