Company

Photographer

The Company Photographer lives again.  My real world photo business is realized here in miniature.  I was  a wet plate photographer and used the items I made in miniature you see here. I had a two wheeled cart similar to the one pictured here.  I actually made small pictures and negatives from my photos and put them on the drying rack.  This is a  temporary setting as I need to improve the ground cover some to make it more realistic.  These are O scale but still very small. The Camera, on the left of the scene, has a black cloth to block out the light on the old camera.

Wet Plate photography came about in the 1860’s.  I was a Civil War Photographer Re-enactor. I used my trade to photograph Civil War re-enactors at the events they had.  All the equipment I used was a copy or some original items from the time period to make the Ferrotypes and Ambrotypes using the same processes they did in the late 1800’s.

The large Yellow and Black box is the darkbox where the images were processed using  a Collodion /Silver Iodide solution and developed using Iron Sulphate and fixed using Potassium Cyanide.  It had a red safe light built in using the sunlight and then reflected around the Darkbox via the yellow cloth.  Inside are two dip tanks and a developing tray and chemical bottles.

The tables had on them trays for washing, drying and then Varnishing the images. One table was for cleaning glass plates for larger negatives to be made and then  salted Albumen prints from them later.

The model of the wagon is one made by Berkshire Model Co. It is marketed as William Henry Jackson ‘s photo wagon.  I made it my own  company.

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I am on the right in the photo. This is a picture of myself and Will Dunniway at the Pioneer History  Center in, Wawona, Yosemite NP.  We were hired by the Park Service to demonstrate Wet Plate photography. We are standing next to an 8x10 tailboard  Camera, like the model of one next to the wagon in the above photo.