Alfred Horsley Hinton: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Justification must be sought in the fact that "no very great incongruity is observable."”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Clouds in their relation to the landscape, p. 27

“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.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 28

Painting

“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.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Pin-hole as a substitute for the lens, p. 61

“I have sometimes felt that writers on the artistic aspect of photography have too often, like the reformers of religious creeds, led their followers into a condition of disbelief and unrest, and then left them to find out for themselves how to live up to new and vague beliefs, so many writers on Pictorial Photography have told us what to avoid without saying why, and have then told us what to do without showing how.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, p. 2

“The louder a sound is, the more we recognize it as being near, so the louder the "tone" of objects that is, the blacker or whiter the nearer they seem; and so if in our picture we wish to give a sense of distance, we must see that the darkest shadows and highest lights are in the foreground : and because we may not be able to materially alter things as the undiscriminating process gives them to us, we must seek for and select those scenes, those subjects, in which this arrangement of highest and deepest tones do come in the foreground, and then take care that our process renders them with fidelity, so that we may not lose the sense of their nearness or the feeling of greater distance of other planes which it is intended they shall give.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Tone and atmoshphere, p. 44-45

Feeling , Sense , Light

“…the purpose of a picture is not veracity to fact so much as truthfulness to idea; that is to say, it is not a question of what eye sees nor even what the brain imagines, but it is a question of what kind of production best awakens in the mind of the beholder the ideas which the maker of the picture desires him to receive.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, The consideration of some examples of sharp and suppressed definition, p. 37

Truth , Imagination , Idea , Question

“It is the subjects which might be imitated by pieces of paper of varying depth of color laid one over the other, which are the subjects that will give more readily the greater satisfaction.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Some examples in composition, p. 60

Color

“If the reader now asks what do I think of this paper or that process, of this brand of plates or of that? Is intensification or reduction to be resorted to? Are enlargements as good as direct work? I have but one answer to all, and that is that only those methods are good which will give you a satisfactory realization of the idea you have in mind. Any paper or process which will do this is good. If an enlargement from a small negative seems to give a fairly satisfactory expression of the idea intended, and the smaller direct print fails, there is your answer; and neither the writer or any one else has any knowledge which can give you a better.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Development of negatives, p. 107

Idea , Knowledge , Thinking

“…to be able to say of a representation that it is "exactly like Nature " is by no means equivalent to saying that it is a fine picture.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p. 3

Nature

“It must ever be borne in mind that the prime object of all fine arts is to please through some or other of the emotions which it stirs.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p.3

Art

“In selecting our subject…there are two factors which it should be borne in mind are essential, and these are Expression and Composition”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 16

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

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 90

Painting

“… what the photographer has to be urged, persuaded and argued with, to do, are often matters which the artist never needs to think about, because it would be unnatural to him not to act in unconscious obedience thereto.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p. 3

Thinking

“There is a difference in printing greater depth to any portion with the negative and shading down without the negative. In the former case we get a deeper and stronger image, still preserving to a great extent the relative contrasts between the lights and shades in that portion. This is not always what we require. In order to concentrate attention upon that is, to emphasize, some particular spot, it may be desirable to shade down and flatten some portion.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 88

Light

“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.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 76

Time , Parting

“In selecting our subject then we have two things to consider. First, is it as good as the conditions will let it be - that is, have we chosen the point of view which, with the present conditions, shows at its best pictorially, and secondly, if taken from this point now, are the alterations we would like, weather or light, to make for us of such a kind that we can introduce them for ourselves when printing, and, if so, what are those alterations.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Some practical suggestions on the selection of the subject and a note on the subject of motive

Light , Weather

“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.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 90

Imagination

“A picture whether or not it is really true to fact must above all things appear true.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Clouds in their relation to the landscape, p. 29

Appearance

“…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.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, The photographic print, p. 36

Future , Forgetting

“…the strongest part of a picture is the sensation and the feeling which it creates, this being done through the agency of certain familiar objects more or less accurately depicted and represented with more or less completeness.
The MOTIVE, then, in all pictorial work is to convey some thought or idea or sensation by means of a chosen subject.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, The application of the foregoing principles, p. 12

Feeling , Motivation , Idea , Parting