"I have sometimes felt that writers on the artistic aspect of photography have too often, like the reformers of religious creeds, led their followers into a condition of disbelief and unrest, and then left them to find out for themselves how to live up to new and vague beliefs, so many writers on Pictorial Photography have told us what to avoid without saying why, and have then told us what to do without showing how."

“...but record and recognition are not pictorial qualities.”

“If we are to select our subjects or arrange our groups with a pictorial motive we must absolutely and entirely sacrifice every other consideration, and be prepared to cut out of our composition the prettiest and most interesting item, if by so doing composition pure and simple is improved. And if some subject you are attached to will not admit of composition or will not admit of your treating it pictorially, then photograph it if you wish, but never suppose that it will form a picture.”

“Inferior as a mechanical printing method for ordinary photographic purposes, the gum process may for a time at least be regarded as standing apart for pictorial purposes, because the large amount of personal control which must be exercised before it can be said to show distinct advantages over other methods implies that the controlling hand must be guided by an artist that is, a man of such large instinctive artistic taste that one can hardly conceive that he would be able to produce a better result by painting, and without the use of photography at all, were he to devote the same skill and endeavour to the employment of brush or pencil, instead of photographic appliances.”

“This is another matter that will need careful study, because the earth, having only one chief source of light, it follows that if clouds be printed into a landscape, both must show evidence of being lighted from the same direction.”

“But the quality of the result obtained by using a pin-hole to which its advocates attach most importance is the suppression of sharp focus over the whole image, no one plane being more sharply focused than another.”

“It is the subjects which might be imitated by pieces of paper of varying depth of color laid one over the other, which are the subjects that will give more readily the greater satisfaction.”