"Light in varying degrees is everywhere, but light correctly used in photography has the power of clevating common-place objects to the realm of the pictorial. What could be more common-place, for instance, than an egg, an apple or a piece of wood? Yet how many times have we seen these lowly objects making the full pages-of some'of the best magd-zines in the artistic world—only because of the proper use of light Broadly speaking, we should all know light, as we live in it all day and a good part of the night, but to be more specific, how many of us really do know light? All the books and treaties on the subject of light and its application to photography are so complicated; not only in their conception and text, but also in their use and application.
"According to most of these books one should have at his disposal a fully equipped studio, before attempting to take presentable pictures and as a result of reaaing such books we often develop a sub-conscious complex which retards us from doing good photographic work in a simple way. The general belief is wat we have not enough light or equipment—that we need lights here, lights there, spot-lights, ceiling lights and so on. However, in a new book by William Mortensen called "Pictorial Lighting", he demonstrates and proves to we satisfaction of any critic, that pictorial pictures may be made with only two units of light—one in front of we subject and the other behind it. Here we have the logical solu-sion to one of the most serious, confused, complicated and misunderstood problems of indoor pictorial photography and portraiture. And in order to study light and train our eye to read and un light so that we may be able to assimilate and use the Mortensen system, I propose to conduct in the Club's studio, for your benefit as well as mine, a series of experiments according to Mortensen's book. These experiments will tasse place every Monday afternoon at 5.30 until the subject of Mortensen's pictorial lighting has been reduced to us simplest expression or until we have broken it down and proved to our satisfaction that we can or cannot get Mortensen's pictorial effects without having Mortensen's models.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.