Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/634

 among the non-photographic public are those of lightning. It is natural to imagine that to secure these pictures, the most rapid of plates and the most perfect of shutters is requisite. As a matter of fact, no shutter is needed at all, and the best plates for the purpose are slow ones. The pictures can only be taken at night, and the process is this. The particular part of the sky in which the flashes are occurring is noted, together with the direction in which the storm appears to be travelling. The camera, brought to the usual focus for distant objects, is then pointed toward that quarter of the sky in which the next flash may be expected to appear. A slow plate is inserted, and the cap is taken from the lens. Upon the slow plate, in the darkness, no impression is made until the flash, immediately after which the cap is replaced, and the plate is ready for development and fixing. Many magnificent photographs of lightning have been taken in this way, and again a blow is dealt at art convention, for never has the picture contained anything like that sharp zig-zag of straight lines pictorially held to represent lightning. A very fine lightning photograph is that which we here produce, taken a few years ago by Mr. A. H. Binden. Here are several distinct great flashes with a large number of interlacing branches, in appearance like the rivers and their tributaries on a map, giving the sky the semblance of a great cracked ceiling. In some photographs dark lines have been observed among the others, of exactly the same shape, and branching from the flashes in exactly the same way. For this extraordinary phenomenon various explanations have been offered, but none that seem quite sufficient.

Among other photographs of natural phenomena, those of leaping and falling water and spray are very interesting. We reproduce an American photograph of the Whirlpool Rapids at Niagara—a very good and clear specimen. It was at about this spot that Captain Webb was drowned.

Altogether the subject of quick photography is a most fascinating one. Although, as we have shown, the art is anything but an outcome of the last few years, it has probably an immense and almost undreamt-of future before it. By its agency, in conjunction with electricity, we are already promised facilities for observing a theatrical performance while sitting at home, what time the telephone or phonograph gives us the words and music of the piece. Let us then watch quick photography, and prophesy its possibilities one to another.