Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Glass Plate Negatives

A little over a week ago, I went to an antique/junk store near Chuckanut Drive (heading to Bellingham, WA). I have been to this store before and found a wealth of fascinating things for very little money. This time around, I found a series of glass plate negatives for only $1 each. Of course, being negatives, it's hard to get an accurate idea of what was being represented. I scanned this one into Photoshop, inverted the colors, and voila. This is what you have. A horse and buggy, a family riding on it to... dunno. Close examination shows that the horse in the back is an appaloosa. Unfortunately, the scan took a lot of the details away. I will probably have to have this developed by a specialty photo lab if I want to see the true details. When looking closely at this, it is very detailed to the point where I can seen their faces (albeit reversed) and the jewelry they were wearing (necklaces). It's too bad I can't find a way to capture this photo in its detail by scanning it; I even tried using my extra-awesome camera to take a macro photo and then reverse color. That didn't work.

So. I present to you a photo of a well-dressed family in (what is probably) the 1890s.

2 comments:

Linda S. Socha said...

Could that be fun? I am wondering..No idea of the expense of speciality labs....but there is something about being able to capture the detail.....Possibly not a novelty to you as a photographer I suspect (?) but finding the detail in this one could be a little like time travel...a little fanciful perhaps
Linda

Ezekiel Barzillai Smythe said...

Thanks again, Linda. I have about 10 of these glass plates, and though it might be a little pricey, I am dying to know what the photos actually look like.