Of course, when the pictures are taken in a studio or place prepared for the work the photographic part is easy--the camera man sets up his machine and turns the crank while the performers do the rest. But some extra-ordinary pictures have been taken when the photographer had to seek his scene and work his machine under trying and even dangerous circumstances. During the Boer War in South Africa two operators for the Biograph Company took their bulky machine (it weighed about eighteen hundred pounds) to the very firing-line and took pictures of battles between the British and the Burghers when they were exposed to the fire of both armies. On one occasion, in fact, the operator who was turning the mechanism--he sat on a bicycle frame, the sprocket of which was connected by a chain with the interior machinery--during a battle, was knocked from his place by the concussion of a shell that exploded nearby; nevertheless, the film was saved, and the same man rode on horseback nearly seventy-five miles across country to the nearest railroad point so that the precious photographic record might be sent to London and shown to waiting audiences there. Pictures were taken by the kinetoscope showing an ascent of Mount Blanc, the operator of the camera necessarily making the perilous journey also; different stages of the ascent were taken, some of them far above the clouds. For this series of pictures a film eight hundred feet long was required, and 12,800 odd exposures or negatives were made. Successive pictures have been taken at intervals during an ocean voyage to show the life aboard ship, the swing of the great seas, and the rolling and pitching of the steamer. The heave and swing of the steamer and the mountainous waves have been so realistically shown on the screen in the theatre that some squeamish spectators have been made almost seasick. It might be comforting to those who were made unhappy by the sight of the heaving seas to know that the operator who took one series of sea pictures, when lashed with his machine in the lookout place on the foremast of the steamer, suffered terribly from seasickness, and would have been glad enough to set his foot on solid ground; nevertheless, he stuck to his post and completed the series. [Illustration: DEVELOPING MOVING-PICTURE FILMS The films are wound on the great drums and run through the developer in the troughs as the drums are slowly revolved.]