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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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HistoryPorn
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He stood there frozen for a few minutes, that's how long the exposure time was before they discovered/invented materials that are more sensitive to light... and then of course, found ways to mass-produce them. Maybe he stood there five minutes?
Gotta wonder how his day was going before tidying up and being asked to stand there like a statue while staring straight at the box in front of him, and how it went after that. In that environment so familiar yet still utterly alien to our eyes. What did he have for dinner that evening. How were the restaurants and bars of the era?
It was a world of steam power but that predated electricity, except maybe for the telegraph, transmitting its' mysteriously instantaneous messages in Morse code wherever the country-spanning wires were laid out, and no further. A world where horses were as abundant as cars are today. A world whose nighttime was lit by candlelight and oil-lamp.
Yes and he chose a particularly challenging pose to hold for a Daguerreotype! Many subjects back then preferred to sit in a very relaxed pose and they even used a small stand to hold the subject’s head still!
I love daguerrotypes, they’re such a vivid look into the past. Exposures outdoors in bright sunlight only took a few seconds, but as this one appears to be taken indoors he would have indeed needed to stand there for quite a while. That’s probably why his left hand is blurry (he’s holding the flag in his right hand - daguerrotypes were laterally mirrored).
Also, see the faint parallel lines all over the picture? Those are faint marks made by the photographer as he was polishing the plate just prior to sensitizing it and loading it into the camera.