The camera

There is a paradox in photography. It seems an artless art -- point the camera, press the button and you have a picture (in a minute, if you like). A child can do it. And yet photography is also a distinctive, uniquely modern medium of expression acknowledged as art. People take pictures at all levels, from the child's to the artist's, and this series of books is planned to serve everyone who uses a camera -- whether to record family activities, to pursue a serious hobby, to advance a profession or to communicate an inner vision. The LIFE Library of Photography assume no previous knowledge of photography, no familiarity with technical terminology. But it concerns itself not merely with the elementary, but also with the newest developments in photographic science and the foremost expressions of photographic art.

To meet the needs of the beginner as well as the advanced photographer, each of the volumes is multi-layered. Each begins at the beginning, with fundamentals. This book, for example, starts with the basic parts of a camera and the relative merits of different types, and goes on to explain the scientific underpinnings of photography -- why some lenses focus sharply over a wider range of distances than others, why distortion occurs with one type of shutter and not with another -- for technical understanding helps a photographer get the most from equipment and processes. Each book offers directly useful instruction -- how to catch the natural expressions of children, techniques of high-speed photography, darkroom processing methods step-by-step. And each contains tables and charts listing and interpreting data on films, developers, lenses, cameras and other materials.

The volumes are layered in another way as well. We feel that history and esthetics can be made to bear strongly on the actual taking of pictures at all levels of competence. Therefore there is a mixture of these elements with practical and technical matters in every book of this series. We aim to expose the reader to as much good photography as possible -- and as much interesting information about the evolution of photography -- while telling him all we can about how to make pictures. It is our hope that this enriching process, as it continues from book to book, will make better photographers of the readers of the LIFE Library of Photography and deepen their appreciation of the subject, whether they approach it as a hobby, as a profession or as an art.