Volume VIII

DECEMBER, 1907

No. 4

A

MAN who can stand or

sit on the flange of a steel beam, not so wide as the sole of your shoe and six hundred feet above a roaring granite-paved city street, there coolly to take successful pictures of the top of the city far below him, must be possessed of three qualifications, and each of the first water. He must have judgment, patience and courage, these three and, one may add without slighting the other two, the greatest of these is courage.

The eager eye of the camera goes everywhere nowadays and the man who makes picturegetting his business adopts no peaceful, unexciting pursuit. If he is under contract to a great newspaper or magazine he may be called upon to secure a picture of anything, from a flashlight in the black depths of a metropolitan sewer to a portrait of the fairest

white slave in a Turkish harem. He may be asked to "get" a female grizzly nursing her whelps, in her mountain lair, to illustrate some naturalist's work, at one end of the year and, before the other end has come, he may snap a shutter on the lip of some smoking volcano's crater.

When you see a striking or a startling picture of man or beast in some extraordinary place or pose, do you ever stop to think where the photographer was who made the negative or how he got there? Reproduced herewith is a photograph of a man at work repairing one of the supports of a cable on Brooklyn bridge. He is in a perilous place, it appears, but where is. the photographer who took the picture? You cannot see him, but he is standing on the other cable of the great bridge or on the dizzy top of its huge pier at a much higher point than the mechanic and, unlike him,

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his employer. A newspaper photographer in Chicago recently received an order to take a picture of the masonry work in the interior of one of the great sewers, for the purpose of proving a point under discussion. Dressing for the part in hip-boots of rubber and other suitable clothing, he carried his apparatus down through a man-hole and followed a guide to the spot where the picture was to be taken. There, kneedeep in water, he set his flashlight, arranged his camera and made his exposure. And the

FROM STEREOGRAPH, COPYRIGHT, UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD, N. Y.

sky-scrapers down

town, even creeping out on cornices and window ledges, where none but the washers of windows ever set foot and they not without their supporting tackle of canvas belt and stout ropes attached to window-casing. This photographer also, with an assignment to secure a picture of

dripping walls of the great drain crowded the smoke I of his flash down upon him afterwards till he had to make his escape with dispatch to avoid most unpleasant effects.

Another member of the craft was directed to get views of smoky chimneys about the city, to show which factory owners and other producers of soot were defying the ordinances. He spent a week climbing about on the roofs of the

the great crowd of unemployed boys and men who daily besiege the office of an afternoon paper at the hour of the edition which contains the help-wanted ads, tried in vain to plant his camera in the street where it would not suffer violence at the hands of the singleminded job-hunters, and, after having his camera upset several times with some breakage, he was finally forced to climb upon the structure of the elevated road, and there, dodging trains and watching long for chance to set up his instrument, finally caught the desired views and delivered them triumphantly.

a

Among the illustrations with this article is one of a daring adventurer, suspended in midair over the sea, in an effort to take a picture of the nest of the sea-eagle, while his assistants wait to pull him up to the top of the cliff after his task is accomplished. He has no support other than the slender lines to which he clings and, below him, the surf is dashing against the foot of the huge rock, with certain death waiting in its foam for the creature who should be so unfortunate as to fall

and

have no eyes for the depths below him and no thoughts except for the business in hand. But some companion, who stood at the moment in the same relation to him as you now do, while you look at the record of his feat, took this picture, and doubtless displayed equal coolness and daring. It is enough to chill the human who keeps religiously away from dangerous toying with the law of gravitation, to look even at the reproduction of this picture, which gives, after all, but faint idea of the reality. Think of holding a camera over the eyes like this, while sitting on a steel bar the size of a rail from a light trolley-track, with one foot barely resting against a brace and the other swinging free, over a space

into it. And the risk and the effort are made to secure something new in pictures for you and me to look at in the pages of a favorite magazine. Hours of hard struggle, with bruises