1876 Western Photography

Are cabinet cards the same thing as cartes-de-visite?

While there were established photography studios, there were also itinerant photographers who traveled around with mini-darkrooms in their covered wagons.

One of my photography history books says that albumen (egg white) prints were so popular that entire cookbooks were written to deal with the surplus of egg yolks. They were so popular that battery chicken farms were invented (in the UK, I believe) to supply enough eggs for printing photographs.

mirandashell said:

Really? I thought intensive farming wasn't invented until the 1940s cos we were so short of food after WW2

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This only refers to chickens. I quote from Victorian Photographers at Work, by John Hannavy (Shire Publications, 1997):

The basis of all albumen printing was egg-white, and such was the demands for albumen that factory farming of hens was introduced in the late 1850s to meet growing demand. According to the Photographic Journal in 1862, one London paper manufacturer alone was using in excess of half a million eggs a year, and these were the days of many small manufacturers rather than a few large ones. (p. 48)

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He goes on to say that the side-effect egg yolks were used in confectionery and tanning leather, but millions were just dumped, there were so many.

That seems really wasteful. I'd have boiled them and fed them to the poor.

wandering said:

Yes and no...here is a link that explains it very well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_card

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I really have to remember to just do a quick check on Wikipedia before answering these things.

One more point, and one that may be totally irrelevant, but ...

Before some time in the 1930s, black-and-white film was super-sensitive to blue light and almost blind to yellow and red light. As a result, blue things look far lighter than they should in old photographs, and red and especially yellow things look much darker than expected. Blue skies are almost always washed-out white, while bright yellow things look very dark indeed.

I have seen a vintage yellow dress which was miraculously kept together with a photo of someone wearing it. It is so dark in the photo, one would have guessed it was dark brown or black.

This is also why East Asian and Native American people look strangely darker in old photographs than they do today; the golden undertones in their skin look dark grey to old black and white film.

No idea if this is relevant, but it's something interesting I noticed.