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Cracked Magazine did a story about old time creepy hobbies and part-time. You might find the photography note interesting.

https://www.cracked.com/article_20483_7-popular-old-timey-hobbies-that-will-give-you-nightmares.html

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Definitely creepy.

Unfortunately that site is so rife with advertisements it's almost impossible to read.

Where was the photography note? Did you mean the "Posing for Victorian Headless Photos"? Was that it?

Ched49 Loc: Pittsburgh, Pa.

During the civil war, photography was just becoming practical for the public.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

It is definitely not a new form of art.

Photography is considered one of the "arts" now, that was not always the case.

The recording technology has changed and that has enabled greater creative license, and enabled the everyday person to partake without the need to learn special skills for the recording device. But that does not eliminate the need for artistic skill.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

In 1970 I was a student in Munich Germany. In glass fronted small buildings corpse were clothed but on display for two days in the down town area. I was told that unidentified or questionable deceased persons had to be displayed like this to ensure identity as a consequence of post WW Two, after the atrocities of the Nazis upon the common people. It was a state law in Germany.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

Mainly in the North (Blue States) of the Union, but intenerate photographers were done by the 'tin type' method in which there were no negative was produced (sort of like a Polaroid of our era), just a single positive image on a thin metal plate, often then lacquered over to protect the delicate surface.

There are questions raised about the documentation of the Civil War battles. The photographic process was the wet collodion process. A photographer NEVER traveled with out blending into large bodies of troops. A photographic wagon had collodion, also known as 'gun cotton' that was used by artillery and the medical personal of both sides. So the photographers tended to stay with large masses of troupes and only after a battle did they venture onto the area of the battles. It was after the civil war that saw the introduction of dry plate (film) plates to photography.

Photography was still mostly a skill that was taught from photographer to apprentice and much of what made photography 'practical' was not know to the public. It is not until George Eastman introduces his version of a point and shoot with vary basic instructions did the US common man learn to 'Kodak' (originally called 'Kodack), where film was attached to rolls of paper, you took the photograph, then after it was used up dropped off the camera, the film removed and freshly reloaded for a simple single price and then the roll of paper negatives were then developed and were 'stripped' from the paper backing, transferred to glass plates and printed.

The biggest problem was that images tended to be under exposed, so Kodak introduced the idea of over exposing film by one stop. If one runs strict parametric zone system tests on B&W film, even today, one will discover that almost ALL B&W films are under rated by a full f stop of speed! Tri-X is ISO 800, not 400.

The old shutter speed of the cameras that Eastman Kodak made had a shutter speed of 1/50 second. With few exceptions, all B&W and Color films produced have a reciprocity factor of 1/50 second. That is the speed the film is designed to deliver the best exposure for.

Knowing the history of what is done in photography goes a long way to understanding and mastering ones craft.

Ched49 Loc: Pittsburgh, Pa.

Great information, thanks.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

Your most welcome.

It is one of the main oddities of photography that almost all critics and historians lack the critical understanding of the technical aspects of photography and so miss the boat on what is actually going on with what photographers are doing. This is quite true in areas outside photography as well. A perfect example is the work of Jackson Pollock and his action paintings.

Pollock was not a substance abuser (read alcoholic) he used liquor to deaden his reality and the world around him as it interfered with his strange perception.

A modern physics did an analysis of Pollack's action paintings using modern computers, he discovered that the paintings could be viewed as mathematic constructs that exactly followed the equations of a Mandelbrot construct. So Pollock was 'seeing' the construct of the world not just as a visual abstraction but as a pure mathematical image of the world as what the artist could feel as sensation. If this is hard to digest, think of Pollock's action paintings as a musical scoring.