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  See picture at the end

Our home is decorated with antiques and collections, as it’s our belief these items should not be hidden away just to possess them. Many items that have a functional purpose, are still used as intended.

But glass negatives do not lend themselves to display. So they sit in a cabinet in the dark room that Wifey uses as her Ebay photo shoot area. I can justify having them and breaking my “Display It If You Collect It” rule, by insisting I’m a savior of old images, rescuing the past with the hope future generations can see these images and understand the incredible work of these early photographers, especially with photos of everyday life with ordinary people.

My last blog showed some of the first batch of seventeen glass negatives I purchased at auction included in a box lot with a tiny spy camera that I was bidding on. I have added to my negative collection selectively over these last fifteen years with an eye toward interesting subjects, not just landscapes or portraits.

Here are some I think you will enjoy seeing. I have reversed the negatives digitally, to show what the printed pictures would look like. Note the rough condition of some. Also study the backgrounds for interesting items, it’s always the details that delight the viewer.

Common portrait of a woman at the end of the century, in a garden, probably wearing a wedding dress.

While early photos of guitar players might be rare, I find the wood stove interesting.

Sitting at her spinning wheel in this sparsely decorated room with the spindly looking plant, our photographer has captured a pensive look in natural window light.

It must have been a snowy winter when this shot was taken,

Our dapper gentleman is loading a shotgun, in this wonderful outdoor photo.

In the same batch, this Milwaukee Country Club Trophy is for Shooting.

Check out this room, with the gentleman sitting at the typewriter in an office chair and using two hands to type. Note! the great stove in the background with a statuette atop, the laundry drying in the corner, wash basket on the floor.

Check out the shoes on this cross dresser, need I say more.

Have you ever seen a better copy of Huck Finn?  Of course Huck didn’t live on this mansion lined street.

Are these the mothers?

And who can resist chickens in a farm yard?

This one is actually a positive print on glass. Our Gang Comedy In The Streets Of Old Milwaukee. Note the Pabst Beer Sign on Tony Rott’s Saloon and dated 1921.

Now lastly, here is what our young lady looks like from the teaser in my last blog.

These glass negatives are found at all antique and collectible venues, but require a watchful eye to spot.

They come in many sizes and I have some in five different configurations from 4-1/4”x 4-1/4” square to 5” x 7” I also have regular negatives and tin type photos in my collection.

Share with us your collection. 

It happened by accident, I had no intention to start a collection of glass photographic negatives.

It was a cool spring day when we went to a farm auction in Hancock, a Central Wisconsin village in a potato and Christmas tree growing area of the state. It was wifey’s sister who called to entice us to come up and attend, with a phone call listing the antiques and furniture to be auctioned .

We arrived early for the viewing and while Wifey headed to the good stuff, including the costume jewelry, I meandered over to the four hay wagons filled with box lots, farm tools, small equipment, household goods, canning jars and Tupperware. I scoured through any box that seemed interesting and discovered a tiny post war Japanese camera, one that I had seen advertised in comic books in my youth. I though it would make a good addition to my camera collection.

As luck would have it, the auction started with the wagon loads and soon came to the box I had interest in, and with no real competition, the box was mine. I plucked my prize out and set the rest of the box next to our folding chairs, while Wifey waited for her desired items to come up. With little interest as the dish sets, glassware and utilitarian items from the farm house were being parceled out to bidders, I peeked to see the rest of my purchase. While other photo “Stuff” was in the box, I was surprised to find a small, lidded container filled with seventeen square glass plate negatives.

To see the images as they would look printed, I have reversed these negatives for your viewing pleasure.

These are some of what I found, produced at the end of the 19^th century, and dated by this photo of schoolchildren holding a sign from the “Lighthouse School, 1897”, one of several in this first lot I purchased at auction that depicts a school and the students.

Who can resist a smile when viewing this picture of a small child. Have you ever seen a tricycle as old as this one before?

One of several portrait pictures in the lot, many of the negatives are of women and appearing to be on farms.

Two rockers, turned leg plant stands and lamp tables, the gas lamps, woodwork on the open stair case and even the pattern of the rug give insight into the household furnishings of that time period. And what’s with the palm tree?

The prize of this lot, a portrait of an African American man.

Wearing a military style uniform, with that hat on the table, it appears to be from a fraternal group. Very popular and abundant in that time period, often started for the mutual insurance benefit of the members.

From these humble beginnings, the collection has grown. With close to one hundred glass negatives, plus glass slides and some regular negatives, I’ll have to take another turn to show you more in my next blog. While I have purchase some in lots, I have become very selective in subject matter, when price is a concern.

Oh yes, the next installment will have the portrait of the young lady at the top, as she appears in a photo, so stay tuned to my continuing saga of “Its a Negative World.”

As previously discussed, ‘TTV’ is a method of photography that produces interesting and organic in-camera aging effects without the hassle of Photoshop. I think that if something can be done organically, it’ll always take precedence over anything done digitally. Check out the previous post to get some more background on exactly what TTV is and what it might require.

So, you have a collection of working or semi-working Kodak Duaflex cameras, as well as your newfangled digital camera… how can you make neat things with them?

First of all, when you’re focusing your digital camera on the viewfinder of the analog camera, you’re going to want to eliminate all external light besides the light entering the analog camera’s lenses. Not only does this give you a clearer image, but it’ll prevent any glare on the viewfinder from obscuring your photograph. Because the distance between the two cameras is likely to be a foot or more, your setup is going to require some kind of lightproof conduit between the two cameras.

By way of example, I found an old, wooden card catalogue drawer that my local library was getting rid of. Through some fluke of fortune, my Kodak Duaflex fit perfectly into the drawer, and its lenses peeked right through the bottom slot, so this drawer served as the basis for my lightproof conduit between the Duaflex and the digital camera.

Next, I tested the automatic focusing range on my digital camera. This is the trickiest part – you want to allow your digital camera to be able to easily focus on the viewfinder of the second camera and be able to capture it cleanly. After a series of test photographs, I discovered that setting my Canon Powershot to macro mode and setting it back by about 14 inches would get me the clearest shot possible. Using that distance, I cut the drawer down to size, and wrapped any open parts (besides the very top and the small section with the lens) with black matboard and tape – all things that I had lying around the studio. At this point, the TTV device begins to take shape. The only thing left to do is seal the top!

When sealing the top, you want to leave a space just big enough to slip the camera’s optical zoom lens through. It’s pretty simple to trace around the lens and cut the resulting circle out of a piece of cardboard. Tape the top panel onto the TTV device and you’re ready to take some photos!

Of course, making this out of wood means that the device is very sturdy, but also pretty heavy. You can use any materials that you have around that can provide lightfastness when taped together – in fact, cereal boxes are favored for their neat designs, thickness, and ease of construction. Other devices use lengths of PVC pipe, and still others are made entirely our of fabric. As long as you have a clear shot between cameras with no intervening light, you’ve got yourself a TTV device. Of course, all of this was gibberish to me until I started looking at pictures, so hopefully the above images illustrate the process better than my clumsy words.

If nothing else, it’s a great use for some of the old cameras you’ve collected, especially when the cost of processing more obscure films is astronomical – if the cameras even function at all. Again, check out the small gallery here on CQ for some more images I took this week, and by all means, enjoy your cameras. They’re pretty, but they do stuff too.

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Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect – Join our Collectors’ Community!

I’ve never been able to grasp photography as I have some of the other visual arts. Sure, I can paint and draw stuff, and I’ve even made a few short films, but capturing a perfect section of reality on a perfect section of film has always eluded me, even moreso when I had to start mixing chemicals to make it appear on a piece of paper. Over the course of my attendance at art school, I taught myself to approach these more difficult arts by embracing their imperfections and emphasizing them to a point of beauty. I spent an entire semester of metal shop by digging in the scrap bin and over-welding every joint I made, and by never polishing my printing plates properly, I managed to pull out some pretty intense textures. Well, I could call them ‘textures’ in critiques – in truth, they were simply the products of my greasy fingers.

So, I have a tendency to shy away from the pristine. I’d rather hear a scratchy LP that a sanitized, cleaned up copy of the same, and I’d rather see a photograph with muted colors and dust spots than a hi-resolution digital image. That’s just the way I roll – knee deep in anachronisms and before-my-timery. If I could hook up an old Corona typewriter up to my Mac Mini instead of this keyboard, I’d probably feel more at home. Also, if the Mac were made of bakelite and rusted metal cogs and I had to pedal or pump some kind of steampunk bellows to make it run. It’s this love of anachronism, paired with some interesting online art communities, that I fell in love with Through The Viewfinder, or TTV, photography.

Essentially, TTV is the art using a camera, which we shall call Camera One, to take a photograph of the viewfinder of Camera Two, while Camera Two is focused on the subject of your choice. Camera One, which takes the actual photograph, is usually a digital camera, whereas Camera Two is a regular ol’ analog camera. Camera Two does not take a photograph, but instead serves as a static conduit for the incoming image. This photograph that you end up taking is visually altered by the unusual systems of mirrors and lenses that the second camera uses. This usually results in various blurring, refracting and prism effects on the final image – and if you’re using an older camera, dusty specks. It’s automatic vintage, and you don’t even need to shove it up Photoshop’s nose.

Since you’re taking a photograph OF a viewfinder, it stands to reason that you’d want a large target to shoot at. We’re not talking about the LCD readout on the back of your digital – we’re looking for real glass-and-mirrors stuff. The most popular camera for this kind of photography is the Kodak Duaflex camera, a TLR (twin lens reflex) camera which features a large 2” x 2” viewfinder and an internal mirror. For anyone born after the last three decades, this is no palm-sized camera. It’s a big, chunky thing that you must hold below you and look down into in order to see what you’re taking a photo of. As a camera, it creates medium format negatives for the professional photographer. For TTV purposes, it has a relatively large viewfinder and captures a lot of detail. Also popular are the Starflex and Kinaflex cameras.

Kodak made four versions of their Duaflex, conveniently called ‘Duaflex’, ‘Duaflex II’, ‘Duaflex III’ and finally, 1957’s ‘Duaflex IV’. Please note that these cameras are neither called the ‘Dualflex’ nor the ‘Duraflex’, though using such terms on eBay will greatly increase your search results from sellers who do not bother to read the labeling on what they’re selling.

I started adding Duaflex cameras to my arsenal of visual devices, right next to the Polaroid Spectra. I’ve never been a camera collector before, mostly due to my uneasy relationship with the device and many unsatisfying photo courses, but my bandolier of cameras seems to be ever-growing. I always take pleasure in subverting devices and formulas to my own unexpected ends. For an investment of well under 20 bucks per camera, I’ve found myself with a full line of vintage Duaflex cameras, with more incoming and about to be subjected to various dissection experiments. Many eBay auctions seem to come with complete camera carrying cases and loads of flashbulbs, and even long-expired film to play with.

For a world going increasingly all-digital, it feels good to take another step backwards in the name of beauty. Check out the photos above, and in our Community Section, for examples of TTV photography, and stay tuned for Wednesday’s instructional about how to make your own TTV device.

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Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect – Join our Collectors’ Community

Did you ever notice how your collection is normal, but another person’s collection can be, well, strange?

It’s not just you. Everybody does it. It’s apparently as much a part of human nature to collect as it is to question the sanity of another for what they collect.

I’ve had someone with me at a flea market be appalled with my $10 vintage linen purchase. “Old used dish towels? Eeeiiwww!” they said. Yet they happily — greedily — paid twice that sum for a poster of their favorite baseball team. Who got the better deal? We’d likely argue to the death over that one. *wink*

When folks stop by our house and see an assortment of items on the dining room table waiting to be shipped, they’ll pick them up one by one and inevitably ask questions about ‘who would want that junk.’

I have to explain, even if only to guess. I have to because I know that even if I don’t know why, even if I don’t squeal with delight over it, I sure do understand the glee behind collecting. No matter what it is.

“Who would want an old photo of a nurse they don’t know?”

“Maybe they are a nurse and they are proud of the history and tradition?” I reply.

“OK, why would someone want an old coloring book — one that’s already been colored in?” they say laughing.

“Being colored in isn’t really an issue for such old children’s books because just being ‘alive’ is rare,” I explain. “I know lots of sewers use the old images for embroidery designs including making modernized iron-on transfer patterns.”

I’m just guessing, of course. Not everyone tells us why they buy what they buy. But when they do, I just love it because the stories, the reasons, are fascinating.

Here are a few collections which, while I wouldn’t call strange, I’ve never thought of before. And each collector mentions why they started their collection too.

Steve Dichter, who worked at station KTLA in Los Angeles for 16 years, takes his vintage color TV’s pretty seriously. (There’s even more here.)

Anthony Pietrak is “Qrazy for Q*Bert” and it shows.

Cliff Muskiet has wanted to become a flight attendant ever since he was a small boy. Before he could achieve that dream, he began collecting stewardess uniforms — he now has more than 640 different stewardess uniforms from 292 airlines and he’s not stopping.

Erik S. Klein has a vintage computer collection of over 50 machines; most of which work well and have original documentation, software and, in some cases, original packaging.

What do you collect? Strange or not, it’s easy to show it off, share your passion for it, and meet other collectors in the Collectors’ Quest Community.

That’s why we say, Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect! – Join our Collectors’ Community.