STUDIO DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION The studio, or " glass-house," as it was origin ally called, or " gallery " or " operating room," as it is more generally termed in America, has, from the first days of photography, received a great amount of attention, and been the subject of much theory and experiment. The earliest illustration of the kind of place used for portrait ture in the days of the daguerreotype process is to be found in a drawing by George Cruikshank, which appeared in the Omnibus of 1844, and which shows an apparently semicircular room, With the sitter placed on a high platform at the central point of the diameter to bring him dose to the completely glazed roof from which he received a flood of all-round top lighting. Modi fications of this form of studio naturally came in with the advent of the wet collodion process, one of the earliest and most notable of these being the original " tunnel " studio, A, of Monk hoven, so called from the tunnel or unlighted portion in which the camera was placed. The idea of this was partly that the operator might be able to focus without the use of a cloth, and partly that the eye of the sitter, who was still illuminated by strong top front light, might have the pupil less contracted by the latter when he was looking into a dark space. It was also thought that a more " restful " expression would thereby be obtained, but the opposite effect was often produced ; and with other improvements, of which the first was the side lighting shown in the diagram, the original tunnel form fell into disuse and is now used for copying only.
One of the first studios constructed with side lighting was that of Col. Stuart Wortley (see B). The sloping front light was of dear glass, and that at the side of corrugated glass to 7 ft. from the ground, thence to the roof being of dear glass. It had two sets of blinds, one opaque and one transparent, and was thus the prototype of the modern system of lighting. The next step towards the more modern forms of studio may be said to be the celebrated one of Rejlander, who brought artistic knowledge to bear upon his photographic work, and designed his studio to get the effects he desired. As shown at C, the erection took more the ridge-roofed form, which later came entirely into use ; it had side, top, and front lights ; all the spaces indi cated in the diagram were of clear glass, though those in the gable ends at least were usually covered with semi-transparent blinds, being used to give some amount of diffused lighting on to the shadow side of the sitter. A later studio was that of T. R. Williams (see D), and this, having had to be made simply by replacing a solid roof by a glazed one at his premises in Regent Street, London, had an unavoidable south aspect ; the difficulties of the direct sun light illumination were got over partly by work ing diagonally across the apartment as shown, and partly by the use of no less than three sets of blinds, one over the other, the outer ones being of dark blue calico, the next of thick white calico, and the inner of thin jaconet muslin. In
spite of all these difficulties of working, the finest photographic work as regards lighting and modelling, produced up to its date, was done in this studio by its clever user.
Another later and, indeed, almost modern, south-lit studio was that of Valentine Blanchard (E), in which the difficulties of direct sunlight were got over by the use of a movable trans lucent screen, as shown on the plan and section, and the use of partly obscured glass in the portions indicated by shading in the diagram. Diagrams F to H show the three principal forms of studio now in use. These are drawn in section, and all to the same scale, to facilitate compari son, the glazed portions being shown by thin lines and the opaque portions of the walls and roof by thick ones. In the first place, all three studios have been drawn to an equal width of 15 ft., but in the " lean-to " and " single slant " types narrower and wider designs have been also respectively indicated to illustrate the greater suitability of the former to narrow studios, and of the latter to wide ones. In the lean-to diagram two roofs of varying pitch are also shown, one at an angle of 3o°, and the other at that of 45°, in the latter of which cases it may be noted that the roof becomes rather long and somewhat costly, a defect which, however, might be reduced by making the upper portion a flat, which, in positions in which it is readily acces sible, might be utilised for printing, etc. The roof is, of course, shorter in the case of the pitch of but it then has the disadvantage that snow would lie more easily upon it, and that the incidence of the light upon the sitter is made slightly more vertical than in the case of the steeper roof. This question of pitch also depends largely on the position of the studio and its surroundings, and in these diagrams it has been assumed that the glazed sides of the studios are facing due north, which is, theoretically, the ideal position, though in practice it is generally better to make a studio, if possible, face a little to the east of north, in order that the sun may be off it earlier in the day. The roof pitch is also governed by the fact that the maximum midday altitude of the sun in summer is a little more than 6o° above the horizon, and that, therefore, unless the pitch of the roof approaches that angle in steepness, the sun will shine over the ridge into the apartment at that time. This is shown in the diagrams F, G and H by the dotted lines to the left. In the case of a lean-to studio, however, it may be assumed that that form would not be chosen unless there was already some structure in existence for it to be built against, and that it would, therefore, be prob ably protected from the south, in which case the roof might be kept flatter in pitch. The lean-to form of roof is best suited for studios of from io ft. to r 5 ft. in width, which are protected by other buildings on the south side, and for which a pitch of 45° for the roof is, therefore, very suitable.