The Press: Life with LIFE

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¶ Photographer Dmitri Kessel worked eight days to get one picture in authentic color of Tintoretto's The Annunciation in Venice's School of San Rocco. One of his biggest problems was to keep both his camera and the 166-in. -by-214 ½-inch framed painting, which had been on the wall for almost 400 years, dead still for a 45-minute time exposure. After overcoming the hazards of Venice's crowded streets and ringing church bells, both resulting in imperceptible vibrations of the building's walls, Kessel discovered another hazard that blurred his picture. The heat from the floodlights made warm air behind the painting push the canvas almost microscopically while his shutter was open. He finally prevented that by heating the painting beforehand with lights. The result was worth the effort: Italian art experts said that Kessel's results "succeeded for the first time in reproducing photographically Tintoretto's original colors as the artist himself must have seen them." ¶ To photograph the rain forests of Dutch Guiana, a LIFE team, including Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, loaded porters with ten tons of equipment including telephone linemen's climbing spikes, seven cameras, and nearly a mile of Manila rope, built a 120-ft. tree house in the jungle to get above the trees and came back with 4,000 negatives. (LIFE used 29.) ¶ Photographer Margaret Bourke-White dangled from a cable dropped from a helicopter for aerial views of the U.S. ¶ In a Florida lagoon. Photographer Hank Walker mounted a camera on a sunken ship, connected it to shore by 4,000 ft. of cable so that he could shoot a jet plane coming head-on to a target with its rockets blazing. A direct hit smashed the camera, but left the film magazine intact. ¶ Photographer Michael Rougier, shooting pictures of Communist May Day rioters in Tokyo, suddenly found himself the main target of attack.

^{* Doubleday, $5, written and edited by LIFE Promotion Writer
Stanley Rayfield.}