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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

What confuses me: These are good photos! Many are sharp, well lit. And they were made from a pocket camera of people who didn't specifically stand still for the photo.

Why on earth did they have people stand like grim statues for those staged photographs? I thought it was because exposure times were extreme with those early cameras but this kinda proves it wasn't? 1890s, those must be among the first photographs, ever.

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You will notice that most of the photopgraphs have been made in direct sunlight. So he could have used high aperture and short shutter time. Most likely it was a fixed-aperture and shutter setup, since he could hardly have adjusted anything while shooting covertly. Still, not all of the photos are sharp, some do have motion blur, and some have grain, perhaps from pushing during development (i.e. correcting slightly underexposed shots).

But the technical basis was definitely on top of the game at the time, under the given conditions.

The first photograph successfully fixed to a substrate was in the 1820s, and the commercially viable daguerreotype came in the 1830s, so photography had been around a while in the 1890s.

If you flip this around a bit... why would people think to smile for photographs? They're not looking dour, they're just sitting for a photo with their natural faces. Their main points of reference were drawn or painted portraits that people also didn't smile for (partially due to the amount of time you'd need to pose).

Smiling for photographs is a social behavior that took time to catch on.

Certainly for a tintype the subjects needed to be well lit and the exposure was still long.

Perhaps this persisted as habit even after the development of colloidal photography?

Yeah, I am even now a little suspicious of the photos authenticity for this reason.

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