Digitization of Butler’s glass plate negatives
During the 1880s, ‘dry plates’ replaced collodion ‘wet plates’ as a staple piece of photographic equipment. Dry plates are thin pieces of glass prepared with a light-sensitive emulsion of silver halides suspended in gelatin, on which a negative image forms when exposed to light.
Being pre-prepared, dry plates enabled photographers to work more freely outside and to travel with their negatives before developing them. Samuel Butler’s snapshots provide some of the best early examples of this method.
Digital scan of glass plate negative D64.11
The positive print in Butler's photograph album - IX/Albums/4/3/1
About 1500 of Butler’s negatives are preserved in the collection. Being made of glass, these are very fragile. They are also covered in century-old chemicals, which make their condition unstable and the images prone to deterioration and fading. To slow down the process of deterioration as much as possible, all the plates have been removed from their original envelopes and boxes, and rehoused in archival four-flap envelopes and acid-free boxes.
The original, acidic boxes and envelopes (above) and their acid-free replacements (below)
To preserve the images, the plates are currently being digitized. This involves scanning each negative to a very high resolution, using professional equipment. The digital image files are stored on disks, so that the images can be readily accessed by researchers without the original plates having to be handled.