Traffic These Days: 1913

It's nice to know that the statue of Alexander "Boss" Shepherd has been returned to its rightful place of honor in front of the District Building.

Just saw a great documentary on the photographer Sally Mann. She was using a huge old field camera and shooting 8x10 inch glass plates, using a collodion wet plate process, with darkroom equipment in the back of her Suburban. She was shooting, amongst other things, old Civil War battlegrounds, and marveling at the flawlessness of old glass negatives from Brady and other Civil War era photographers. As we do here about twenty times a day...

It was great seeing how it's actually done.

I liked the notion of the Haynes roadster speeding off into Eternity, by the way. Very evocative.

Is a glass plate a "positive" versus a glass "negative" of the photograph?

[They are the same thing -- the negative is a glass plate. "Plate" just means flat -- a flat sheet of glass, like windowpane. The negative is made by taking the glass plate out of the camera and dunking it in developing solution. Most of the images you see on Shorpy are made by shining a light through the negative onto an image sensor and then electronically reversing ("inverting") the result. Below are some pictures of an actual glass negative that I took in my kitchen. Click to enlarge. - Dave]