Photographic Amusements, Ninth Edition (Illustrated)

• This new digital edition is published with with additional pinhole, spirit and double exposure photographs.

This book explores early analog photography tricks and special effect. Areas covered include Pinhole Photography, Artificial Mirages By Photography, Freak
Pictures By Successive Exposures, Double Exposures, Magic Photographs, Silhouettes and Leaf Prints with illustrations and photographs. As described on it's original cover: 'Including A Description of a Number of Novel Effects Obtainable with the Camera'. Originally published in 1922, the book looks at the novelty of photographic special effects, long before the advent of digital photography and Photoshop made them an every day occurrence.

Extract from the book:
LEAF PRINTS.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of form and structure of the leaves of different plants. Ruskin observes: “Leaves take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whirls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths; endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same, from footstalk to blossom, they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness and take delight in outstripping our wonder.” Photography has placed in our hands a simple method of preserving facsimiles of their ever varying shapes that will last long after the leaf has died and crumbled to dust. Although the discovery of the darkening action of silver chloride when exposed to light was discovered by Scheele as far back as 1777, little was apparently known of the possibilities attending the discovery until 1839, when Fox Talbot read a paper on “A Method of Photogenic Drawing,” in which he described various experiments that could be made with paper coated with this substance, and showed many pictures of leaves, ferns, and pieces of lace which he had obtained.