I’m continuing to work on our photo collection, currently trying to get an inventory of our most prized little cased photos: tintypes, daguerreotypes, and ambrotypes. It’s an intricate process: digitize the image; tweak it on Photoshop for accuracy and clarity; tag the subject matter; enter the data on a spreadsheet; find out if there is a matching purchase receipt in Jim’s mountainous “receipt collection.” Cased photos are complicated by the fact that often the cases are more valuable than the photos. So, if one is in a collectible early thermoplastic case, I have to look that up too and include it in my spreadsheet.
Pretending that I’m the Smithsonian, I enjoy uploading the images to cosmorochester collects at Flickr, to share them with the world. Last month, I posted the Civil War faces. Today, I’m featuring daguerreotypes. (Slide show below — watch them giant-sized here.) Nearly all these people are unidentified, so all that remains of them are their images.
Interesting faces. Also the womens’ hairdos were very different on some of the photos.
Wow.