SELECTION AND ARRANGEMENT.
It is a mistake to attempt to include too much in the picture ; a small portion of a landscape, treated with discrimina tion and taste, will be more effective, as a rule, than a wide expanse introducing many opposing and conflicting beauties. But the arrangement of the view should be complete and sufficient in itself, leaving no lurking desire in the mind to see more ratio to each other, such as 1 to 2, or 2 to 3. For the sake of example, divide each side of the focussing screen into three parts, and connect- these divisions by pen cilled lines, as in Fig. 637. Then an ob ject placed on any one of these dividing lines, as 1, 2, 3, etc., is favourably situated to attract the eye, while if placed at the junction of any pair of lines it will com pel the maximum of attention. If the small rectangles be imagined to be than the camera has shown, or the effect will be disappointing. There should be a principal object on which the interest or sentiment of the picture should be, as it were, concentrated, and this should be somewhere near the centre. All objects
of secondary interest, not really essential to the composition, should be as far as possible excluded. Experience and ob servation teach that the relative promin ence of different objects is considerably affected by their position in the picture. The least important position is the exact centre of the picture, while the strongest and most effective are generally agreed to be those whose distances from opposite sides of the picture bear some simple divided by diagonals, as at 5, the inter sections of these also are strong points of a minor character, except that in the exact centre of the focussing screen, which, as previously explained, receives less notice than any other point in the picture.