F. J. Mortimer Photograms of the Year 1914

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. No account of progress in the year's photographic work would be complete without a reference to the use of what are termed soft-focus lenses, the employment of which appears to be getting general among pictorial photographers. These lenses have the very desirable quality of conferring a certain amount of breadth of effect to the photographic image, and as this quality, in its right degree, is one that the artist is ever seeking, they appear to fill a long-felt want. In the past, a variety of means have been suggested for the purpose of obtaining a suppression of hard photographic detail and outline, and the use of diffusing media, pinholes, etc., have been adopted with varying success, but it has remained for the Optician to produce a perfectly legitimate method whereby breadth can be introduced without in any way endangering the truthfulness of the rendering, and, at the same time, giving a distinctive quality and modelling. In this way an essentially technical contrivance has been applied to produce an undoubted pictorial result.