TheFlyingCamera

Well, my vintage collection is growing, slowly but surely. This weekend I was outside of Philadelphia with my parents to go see the Barnes Collection and do a little antiquing. I found a nice little tintype not in a case or any other kind of mount, but it featured a young man in some kind of working outfit, outdoors on the stump of a tree. The unusual circumstance of the man sitting on the stump outdoors drew me to it, as the vast majority of tintypes show sitters in a studio, in a very formal circumstance and attire.

At another dealer, I found a wonderful collection of dags, tins and ambrotypes. I went a little crazy, picking up a nice 1/6 plate dag of two sisters (perhaps twins) in an immaculately preserved thermoplastic union case, a half-plate cased tintype of a father and his two daughters, and a caseless but matted ambrotype in excellent condition, which had the interesting side effect of letting you see how the photographer achieved the finished effect - a second piece of glass was blackened and sandwiched behind the first.

I'm now up to 18 cased (or formerly cased) images in my little collection, ranging from the half-plate tin down to some 1/9th plate tins and a good number of 1/6 plate dags.