The question of mountain-photography is a thorny one, but it must be faced. The reader can scarcely deny that if mountains really looked like the ordinary run of commercial photographs of them, they would be ugly or at least unattractive objects. A volume of such photographs would scarcely lead a man, who had never left his home, eagerly to desire a close acquaintance with snowy peaks. That, however, was actually what Mr. Whymper's woodcuts did. Hundreds of readers of his book were thereby led to become mountaineers. Wherein does this different efficiency consist? A photograph, in theory, repeats every detail of the view it contains. Such details as drop out are either too small or too faint to be visible in the print. A camera does not select. It takes all. In this respect it differs altogether from the human eye. If you look fixedly in a definite direction and regard carefully what it is that you actually see, you will discover it to be a few central details only, and that they are surrounded not merely by vaguely defined objects but by objects duplicated. Thus the sight of the eye and the sight of a camera are not alike, either in what is beheld or what is selected. The sense of beauty depends upon what the eye selects. It would seem then that the beauty of a view could not possibly be reproduced by photography, and such was the crude conclusion once held by artists of the capacities of this modern process. Photographers, however, have proved that such is not necessarily the case.
In the infinite effects, all of them beautiful, that a single landscape is capable of yielding, and yielding simultaneously, most are beyond the reach of photography; but the same is likewise true of any one art-process. Pen-and-ink drawing, for example, is as incapable of reproducing colour effects as photography. Each art has its own limited area of possible effect. Photography, in so far as it is an art, is subject to its own definite and rather narrow limitations. A photographer can choose his subject and determine its exact limitations. As he can deal only with forms and tones, he must choose a subject so arranged by nature that its forms are in themselves beautiful, and its tones a harmonious distribution of light and shade. But light and shade varies with the hour of the day and season of the year, and forms vary with the drift of clouds over the hills, so that the selection of moment becomes for the photographer as important as the choice of point of view, direction, and area of subject. Again, by choice of length of exposure and by methods of development, the photographer can alter the quality of light and shade in his negative and the amount of detail he renders. These three factors are entirely under the photographer's control, and in so far as he avails himself of them, not merely to reproduce a view but to reproduce the picturesque effect in a view, he becomes and deserves to be regarded as an artist.
