That's a nice little find, pictures like that fascinate me.
Yep, my thoughts exactly, sometimes we get so bogged down with things like tactics, weapons and battles that it becomes easy to forget that the war was fought and endured by real people, young people.
Notice how the photographer has retouched the area around the sides of his face so that it shows up better against the dark background, like this one of mine:
There are different sizes of Whole Plates and Half Plates. These are generally accepted as the norm today:
I will add to what Mike has said that the actual terms derive from the number of individual pieces of glass or metal that could be cut from a single more-or-less standard-sized pane or sheet. Naturally, given the in-exactitude of such a process, actual sizes tended to vary, sometimes by quite a LOT! As an example of what I'm talking about, note how this example of an ambrotype from my collection has been crudely and sloppily hacked from a glass pane resulting in a very odd size and shape:
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