I meant to post this earlier when I saw it listed on the Flickr blog, but I was happy to see that the National Archives has started to post photos on Flickr using the creative commons license. One of the first collections they added were the scans from the Mathew Brady Civil War collection.

Mathew Brady (1823-1896) was one of the most prolific photographers of the nineteenth century, creating a visual documentation of the Civil War period (1860-1865).

The U.S. National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images from the series Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes (National Archive's Local Identifier 111-B) and included them in our online catalog. We plan to upload all of the ones available in the online catalog to Flickr gradually over a few months.

The sets for the Civil War photos can be viewed on Flickr under their new collection. One of the benefits for me is that I can now easily explore these photos for my own Civil War photographic project. I have already been inspired by many of the photos I have seen in this collection for my upcoming work. 

The Civil War was one of the first historic events that were able to be covered via photography and started the career of photojournalism. These photos are a great tour of the history of that time and I can spend hours looking through this collection.

General Ambrose B. Burnside and Staff of Twenty

Flickr link

The National Archives has also posted the full sized scanned images of these wet plate photographs. This gives you the ability to zoom in close to see the amazing details that were captured over 150 years ago. Here is the same photo zoomed in to 100%. Ambrose Burnside is shown on the right with his distinctive style of facial hair which is now known as sideburns, derived from his last name.

One of my major goals for this year is to finish planning and start my Civil War Infrared photography project in anticipation of the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War next year. In a nutshell my project is to photograph the Civil War battlefields using an Infrared converted digital camera. You can view some of the images in this Flickr set.

I have always found the study of the past and history an interesting subject. I continue to research and learn about the history of the world in my spare time and listen to several history based podcasts on my daily commute to work. I'm not sure if I'm just wired that way or maybe it was an influential history teacher in my past that generated my interest in History. You can't chalk it up to older age since I have always been interested in the subject (especially Military history.) 

Many people could care less about history and have no idea why I would want to waste my time on such a project. I recently saw the following article in my feed reader and it gave me a pause to think about how people think and view history.

Proof that History puts people to sleep
Gary Crabbe Enlightened Images

"However, with my current book project, the minute I tell people (or they sense) that it's a history book, they fall asleep. They turn off. They tune out. They switch off their radar. It's like you suddenly become a non-important entity. In all of my career, I've never experienced anything like this. But it's happened so often, among so many people at so many levels, that I'm now 1000% convinced that it's purely related to the history aspect." [ read more ]

So with this in mind I'm opening up the following questions to my readers.

Do you tune out history?

Do you have interest in history based photographic projects as an art viewer or maybe an art buyer?

Please leave a comment below.

I ask this question more out of curiosity rather than determining the future of this project. As a creative person and image maker I'm still going to proceed as planned no matter what the response. I'm just curious if history based projects are doomed to failure from the start.

Recently I saw a post on The New Modern about a documentary of Sally Mann's process to photograph Civil War battlefields using a Civil War era photographic processes. Introduced in 1851, the wet-plate collodion process is a method of making photographic negatives on glass plates that have been coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The plate is then coated with a silver nitrate solution, loaded in a plate holder into the camera, and then exposed while still wet and sticky. The photographer has only about five minutes to make the picture before the solution dries.

This process is alluring and the results have a distinctive look that I find attractive. There is a growing number of practitioners  returning to these alternative photographic processes. As I spend more time researching my Civil War photography project I'm finding that many of these practitioners are also actively working on projects as well. I don't see myself switching to alternative processes at this time, but it certainly interesting and maybe something I could explore later.




For those interested in the history of photography I highly recommend Jeff Curto's History of Photography podcast. He records his lessons from his History of Photography class at the College of DuPage. I have listened to a couple of semesters worth of classes and have found them both interesting and valuable in my photographic research.

Here are some additional links to people that are actively exploring and using the wet plate process for their photography
Tintypes, Ambrotypes - Wet Plate Photography
Photography Contrastique - My Alternative Photographic Processes Diary
Civil War Photography - R.J. Szabo

One of the key lessons I learned in my college economic classes was the concept of opportunity costs. In a nutshell given a set of scarce resources and multiple needs, when you apply that resource to one of the needs you are giving up on the others. Those unmet needs are the opportunity costs.

One of my goals for this year is to focus my time, money, and attention (all scarce resources) on just a few goals and projects. This requires me to postpone or give up other projects I had running simultaneously in the background so I can use my scarce resources towards the goals I want to accomplish.

A recent example was presented to me last week. For the past couple of years I have been asked to photograph the talent show at my daughters old elementary school. In the past I saw this as a way to give back to the school and to potentially  build up a portfolio and client base for a future photography business. Last week I was asked once again to photograph the event this year. I was not able to photograph it due to a scheduling conflict but I took this opportunity to explore my options as if I was available.

The start of a new year gives me time to reflect about the coming year and also about the year past. What went well and what didn't. The last year was a tough one for the family and I. This time last year I had a single goal, to find a new job. I accomplished that goal in the middle of July and I'm happy to be fully employed again, unlike many people in the current economy.

My creative photographic output also suffered for the first half of the year. I guess Maslow knew what he was talking about. While I was unemployed I took consulting jobs to help pay the bills and I also toyed with the idea of taking some paid photographic jobs. I shot several events and portraits last year with the idea to build up my photographic portfolio. This portfolio could be used to help launch a photo business. During these small odd jobs I quickly confirmed something that I already knew, I don't want to make a business out of my photography. I like having my photography as a hobby and creative outlet. Turning it into a business and becoming a professional photographer is just not for me. I'm happy and proud to call myself an amateur rather than an aspiring professional.

Back to my goals for this year, I have found that the goals that have the highest likelihood of being accomplished are the goals that are written down. So with that thought in mind here are my goals for Twenty 10.

Yesterday I visited the Monocacy Civil War battlefield for a couple of hours. I have driven past this area hundreds of times but this was the first time I visited the park. My plan for this trip was just to scout out the area to find potential subjects I want to shoot for my Civil War in Infrared project. Ideally when I shoot in infrared I'm primarily looking for puffy white clouds in a blue sky. On this day I had almost complete cloud cover so many of the infrared photos I took look very ominous.