Modern Photos Get Amazing Civil War-Era Treatment

I'm watching it with no sound due to other people, but it looks like they deliberately tried to capture modern elements in the background. Why?
 
I'm watching it with no sound due to other people, but it looks like they deliberately tried to capture modern elements in the background. Why?
In the comments on YouTube, someone asked the same question, the response was that this isn't so much about historical accuracy as it is art, the photographer was attempting to show the modern and old world merging as one.
 
I'm watching it with no sound due to other people, but it looks like they deliberately tried to capture modern elements in the background. Why?
Same here (no sound) but I expect it's a kind of art, to show what the pretend past of a reenactment looks like when photographed with a period medium. The goal isn't to duplicate the past but to record the reenactment. (Edited to add: didn't see Waterloo50's reply till I posted.)

On a side note, I used to have a camera like that, or an equivalent look alike. Mine was a "PonyPremo," 5x7, used sheet film but one could use any sort of plateholders for glass or whatever. It was from the turn of the 20th century and his is probably about the same era.

He's either got a different lens or it was a different brand, because the Pony Premo had a quirky double cylinder shutter. Still, his has a shutter, unlike most period cameras. You can see him press down on it in the first sequence showing him and his camera.

I always found that the way the camera was mounted, with the lens far out from the tripod support, meant that anything with a slow shutter speed blurred, and I needed to use a bulb and tube to trip the shutter. No idea how he's managing the longer exposures of wetplate with the shutter.

He's not pretending to reenact though, just a modern guy in modern clothes with a view camera, and those turn of the century cameras are great for that, cheap (relatively speaking), few moving parts. I bought mine just for modern photography.
 
The video goes along with the May 2012 edition of National Geographic with the article written by the same photographer.
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Most large reenactments will have one or two photographers that do photography in the original process. This photo was done almost 10 years ago, I'm on the extreme right. ( as you're looking at it ) But since this was done by the wet plate process, the image is reversed. I was actually standing on the left.

13thNJandFriendsOceanGrove05.jpg
 
The video goes along with the May 2012 edition of National Geographic with the article written by the same photographer.
View attachment 99116
Interesting clip
In the mid 1970s I got onto a darkroom bender
for awhile I was using sepia tone and some , hand cropping , fluttering techniques
some where so popular that I
made and developed about 150+ seated portraits of young men in Civil War uniforms
That burned me out, too many late nights in the darkroom with all those chemicals
Not plates , just regular Kodak 35mm film
tested by the deadlines

have not done any since
 
Most large reenactments will have one or two photographers that do photography in the original process. This photo was done almost 10 years ago, I'm on the extreme right. ( as you're looking at it ) But since this was done by the wet plate process, the image is reversed. I was actually standing on the left.

View attachment 99120
That could pass for an original CW photo. Did you have to stand and pose for a long time or was it a fairly quick process?
 
No, not really very long. Less than a minute, once we got ourselves posed.
Thank you, the only reason I was asking is because in some of the original CW pictures that I have seen there are hidden stands that were strategically placed so that people wouldn't move and blur the picture. I assumed that the photographic process took several minutes.
 
IIRC, once we were posed, the photographer removed the lens cap for about 20 - 30 seconds, while we tried to stay perfectly still. That's it. Developing the image took a lot longer.
 
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