Cool stuff!

It's interesting to see how the photographer focused the camera. In some photos, the clothing or headdresses are crisper than the face.

Part of that may be due to the type of lens and plate used. Older style lenses were not corrected for chromatic aberrations. Collodion and some of the dry process plates react to the quality of light differently than modern film or digital. Dry plate and collodion are slow. You have to shoot wide open to get reasonable times for your sitters. At portrait distance, with a large aperture, your plane of focus is some times less than an inch. She may have focused on the subjects eyes but the combination of film, lens and light shifted the focus slightly closer or farther away. She saw the eyes in focus on the ground glass but the film picked up a different spectra.

Sometimes using a yellow filter will eliminate the focus problems like that. My Turner Reich is like that.

Or … they moved. 😀

There is one photo where the man has a chain or string of beads in his hair that was moving slightly. Gave the photo a hypnotic affect. With all the feathers and fluff on their clothing and headdresses, I was impressed any of those were clear. I really liked the pictures.

I was thinking the same thing regarding thdir plane of focus. I was looking at them trying to figure out what was trying to be emphasized. When i take tintypes i try to find something around the middle thickness of wbat im looking at, but also something with interesting detail that will show well in the photo.

I wonder if those pictures are tintypes or contact print or something else. Some of them have borders and rough edges like tintypes, but it would seem like an odd medium for such nice photos at the time. I agree with the dry plate though, based on the time period and the fact that the one gentlemans dog is actually a dog and not a blur

Yeah, the 1890's was well into the dry plate era. The manufacture of plates was still rudimentary and some of the artifacts could have been introduced by development and handling. If you've seen a dry plate holder, they have recesses to hold the plates. You'd get some raggedy edges just putting the plates in and pulling them out of the holder.

Yeah, i get those edges on my plates. You also get a nice border from those holder edges covering the film from exposure.

Very cool!

Very cool article, thanks for sharing. :3