Production Outdoor Portraits at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

If you haven't the ability to produce portraits which are a good cut above those turned out by the department store studios and are merely casting about for a way to make money with your camera, you'll be much better off to specialize in some other branch of photography. On the other hand, if you enjoy taking portraits, you shouldn't find it too hard to beat the quality of the mass-production outdoor portraits portrait studios such as those in department stores, because you have several advantages over the operators of these picture mills.

To take these small portraits, Disderi first made a wet-plate negative with a special Camera that had four lenses and a plateholder that could be slid from side to side. Four exposures were made on each half of the plate; thus eight poses could be taken on one negative. A single print from this negative could then be cut up into eight separate portraits. Unskilled labor was used for this work; the production outdoor portraits of the cameraman and printer was thus increased eightfold.

There is a type of portrait photography, and one which makes a wonderful specialty for those who have the flair to practice it impressively, which requires no studio lights at all and, indeed, not even a studio. This specialty is the production of outdoor portraits or character studies.