Another trip to the lumber yard, another adventure.
Stopped in for a coffee and carrot cake at the "Gone Scrapping" coffee shop in a small town west of me, the owner is into photography. She has a small photo printer that she does custom printing off of, any how we got to chatting and one thing led to another when she told me the town hall had just recently come across a bunch of glass negatives, which in fact are positive plates.
The town is looking for someone to digitize, after leaving her shop headed over to town hall, yea they have over 1500 glass positive plates that were found in an old building being torn down. Each negative is 5 inches by 7 inches, I only had a peek at a few before submitting my offer to digitize the lot.
Inside each envelope is one glass negative with two proofs, from the sample I have posted you will note that the image from the proof and negative are reversed, also that the proof ( print ) is the same size as the positive.
The reason for this is that the prints were made by contact, the glass positive plate laying onto the photo paper then exposed using a UV light source which could have been the sun at high noon.
The reason the images are reversed is because I held them wrong.
Judging by the clothing these folks wore I would say that this photographer was active during the late 1800's to around the 1920's or 30's
From the few plates and prints I did examine they were from silver which would indicate they were produced before the first world war, shortly after the war began silver was banned from public use having been called into duty for the war effort.
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