Early photography madness!

The first full day here at CHAVIC has been tremendous.

First of all, here's Cotton Mather's chair that I mentioned in the last post:

No, I did not sit in it.  But I did take this photo.  And photos are legit.  I just need to say that all the glory that you see here comes from the American Antiquarian Society.  It is a place of awesomeness. 

The morning's session was a hands-on activity where we learned about the differences between dageurrotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, each of which is a process used in early photography.  My favorite, I think, is the daguerreotype.  It's an amazing image.  Our curator told us that they caused all sorts of problems because people simply didn't recognize their own images.  The images have no color (except when it was added by hand after the image was done), and, more importantly, the image was reversed, so if you parted your hair on the left, your daguerreotype had a part on the right.  Downsides of daguerreotype: 2 minute long exposure times.  That's a lot of sitting still!

Here's my favorite dageurotype:

Yup, that date is 1860.  Sorry my photo quality is pretty bad -- my camera is not terrific, and in any case, the dag has a glass plate on the front, which makes it very difficult to photograph.

Then there was a fabulous family album; I'll include a few shots of pages here:

OK, did you SEE that facial hair setup there on the left!  Awesome!  But the kids on the right -- pretty cute, huh?  Well, one of the experts here happened to know a lot about the photographing of children in the early days, and here's what she told us: see that big sash on the middle of his/her dress?  That's not just a decorative silk ribbon -- it is there to HOLD THE CHILD IN PLACE, because the particular photographic method probably required about 40 seconds of standing still for a proper exposure (with some variation depending on light levels -- there's no flash at this point).  So the next time you see nineteenth century photos with lovely silk sashes on the kids -- know that they are being restrained.

A slightly later page of the same album featured this:

It's a dog! It's a dog!  (and yes, that's a soldier in his Civil War uniform on the left).

OK, so there is so much more to say, but now we are off to Ralph's Diner.  I'll try to report back more later.  My teaser for the review of the afternoon's activities: havelocks and housewives and homespun, Oh My!  Stay tuned.