Picture-making by photography
A late nineteenth-century London manual on artistic photography by H. P. Robinson, a photographer writing for amateurs and practitioners who wanted pictures composed like paintings. Its pictures are small pen-and-ink landscape sketches, mostly of riverbanks, trees and figures, with soft tonal masses and open skies that show how a photographer might frame and balance a view. A designer could take from them simple compositional habits: a foreground of reeds or water leading the eye into a distance of trees and hills.
