t.

There is only one way to dodge this issue. Just as you can hire a typist
to put your manuscript into legible form, you can pay a professional
photographer to accompany you wherever you go and take the illustrations
for your text. But the same vital objection holds here as in the case
of the professional typist--the costs will cut heavily into your
profits. With a little practice you can learn to do the work yourself.
After that, you can operate at a small fraction of the expense of hiring
a professional.

Your work soon enough will be of as high a quality as anything that the
average commercial photographer can produce, and, better yet, it will
not have any flat and stale commercial flavor about it. Nothing is more
static and banal than the composition that the ordinary professional
will produce if you fail to prevent him from having his own way. Ten to
one, all the lower half of the picture will be empty foreground, and not
a living creature will appear in the entire field of vision.

It cost the present writer upward of $150 to discover this fact. Then he
bought a thirty dollar postcard kodak and a five dollar tripod and told
the whole tribe of professionals to go to blazes. The only time since
then that he has ever had to hire commercial aid was when he had to have
heavy flashlights made of large rooms.

So save yourself money now, instead of eventually. Even if thirty
dollars takes your last nickel, don't hesitate. For a beginning, if you
are inexperienced in photography, rent a cheap machine with which to
practice--a simple "snapshot box" with no adjustments on it will do
while you are picking up the first inklings of how to compose a picture
and of how much light is required for different classes of subjects.

After you have practiced with this for a while, go out and buy a folding
kodak. If you have the journalistic eye for what is picturesque and
newsy the camera will quickly return 100 per cent. upon the investment.

The one great difficulty for the beginner in photography is that he does
not know how to "time" the exposure of a picture. The books on
photography are all too technical. They discuss chemicals and printing
papers and all the finer shadings of processes carried on in
laboratories under a ruby light. But what the novice longs to know is
simply how to _take_ pictures--what exposure to allow for a portrait,
what for a street scene, what for a panorama. He usually fails to give
the portrait e