PAD 68 - Yesteryear

[Mike Farley]

Day 68 and a trip to a local camera dealer. These cameras, which would have been expensive items when new, were left heaped and unboxed in a tray, selling at pocket money prices. Mind you, they are modern compared to the camera which another customer was buying as I arrived. It was an antique Thornton Packard plate camera, with which he was intending to use the wet plate collodion process. Dating back to the 1850s, glass plates have to be coated, exposed and developed whilst still wet as the emulsion becomes much slower when it is dry. Depending on the temperature, the maximum time from preparing the photographic plate to putting it in the developer is around 10 minutes. The Victorian equivalent of instant photography!