Glass Plate Negatives

The Attic

I remember finding a wooden box in the attic of an older lecture hall at the University of Connecticut. It contained glass plate negatives. I was intrigued with an image of a house and wondered if it existed near campus. I took the plate to a camera shop had and them print a contact sheet so I could have a positive image. Surprisedly I was able to locate the house, surrounded by trees just off campus. This type of sleuthing has always been of interest to me since photography offers a way to look back in time. It was probably a inevitable that I would someday involved with historical photos.

New Ipswich Historical Society

When I became a member of the New Ipswich Historical Society, I offered to scan photos from photo albums to preserve them as digital files for publication. These were prints, many of which were faded and torn. I have enough skill in photoshop to bring back some details but there are limits to what can be done.

https://flic.kr/p/2ijECi8 Using photoshop to equalize the RGB levels of a faded photo from the New Ipswich Historical Society

Glass Plate Negatives

Glass plates were used as the first base for photographs from 1850 to 1920. I discovered that the New Ipswich Historical Society had several wooden boxes of negatives. Unlike the paper photographs, the glass images were pristine. I needed to devise a way to digitize them. This is not something that can be done with a regular slide or flatbed scanner.

The Rig

https://flic.kr/p/2oKCvHe Light table with plate glass negative

The first thing I did was buy an inexpensive light table. The new ones have LED lighting and produce a perfect backlight for the glass negative. The glass lies perfectly flat unlike film negatives which curl. I supported my camera with a mount and used a remote control for the shutter.

https://flic.kr/p/2gxChxV The only post processing needed is some cropping and inverting the image in Photoshop or other editor.https://flic.kr/p/2mYKA6T Appleton Dormitory photo digitized

Portfolio

A collection of the digitized photos from glass plate negatives of the New Ipswich Historical Society. Many of these were reproduced as postcards.