Hidden mysteries in glass plate negatives.
#008
In early December last year, my wife shared a Facebook Marketplace link with me simply titled “old glass negatives.” I clicked the link, which took me to a listing by a young man in Mannington, West Virginia. He was offering ten glass plate negatives for $30 and added that he had no information about their provenance.
After exchanging a few messages, I agreed to buy them for $30 (plus $10 shipping). He lived nearly three hours away (I’m in Lincoln County and he was in Marion County), so he agreed to mail them, promptly sending me a picture of the receipt and tracking number.
A couple of days later, I received them in a Priority Mail box. I’ve only seen a handful of glass plate negatives in person, so I was pretty excited to see what images these might hold.
Glass plate negatives emerged about a decade before the Civil War. Based on the clothing and other artifacts present, I estimate these images were made somewhere around 1910.
Right now, some of you are cringing at the sight of me handling these without archival gloves. I’m sorry and you’re right. In my haste to see what they held, I completely skipped over the part where I should be handling these more carefully. To make you cringe further, I’m still storing them in the USPS bubble wrap inside the original box they were mailed in. But…I fully intend to store them longterm in four-flap negative enclosures in an archival box in my home studio.
So, how did I take a 100+ year-old glass plate negative and turn it into a positive image? The process is pretty straightforward. I used a light box my former boss and mentor, Bill Stice, gave me years ago. One by one, I placed each negative on the light box and made a picture of it with my iPhone (15 Pro Max).
From there, I imported the picture from my iPhone into Photoshop and selected Image > Mode > Adjustments > Invert. I repeated this process for all the glass plate negatives. I’ll add that my wife and I worked through this process together and the anticipation every time I clicked 'Invert’ left us like kids watching fireworks.
The following three screenshots show the process in Photoshop.
Without further ado, here are the ten glass plate negatives in the order in which I scanned and processed them followed by their respective positive.
I’ve studied these images for hours and find that I can easily get lost in them. Who were these folks? Where’d they come from? Where’d they go? My questions are endless as is my fascination with both the subject matter and the process of how the images were made.
Some of the images may not be correctly oriented, but where I could, I did. For example, for men’s clothes, buttons are usually on the right side. As for the landscape images, I’m just guessing blindly.
I keep coming back to 1 and 6 as my favorites. In image 1, I love that there’s a camera present. Is it the photographer himself holding a second camera? Is it one of the workers holding a second camera belonging to the photographer? In image 6, I love the little girl on the left. What happened to her? What was her life like? I would to have answers to these questions.
Do you have family in Marion County, West Virginia? Do you recognize anyone or any of the places in these photographs? Do you have a favorite?
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Roger
The way in which photographs age is such a cool thing to see… Can’t imagine what life might have been like back then probably a lot more simple. Thanks for sharing, love that train photo with the steam from the engine rising up.
These photos make me crave Appalachian history even more. I'm like you, I would love to know the stories of the people and places in these photos.