DIGITALLY DEVELOPING VICTORIAN GLASS PLATE NEGATIVES

These are 'fixed' versions of images I've taken from a recent purchase of mine. I went to the Spitalfields Vintage and Antiques market on Saturday (it happens on the last Saturday of every month) and found a little package that looked like this:

I was fairly intrigued by it, and on closer inspection they turned out to be Victorian glass photographic plates. Looking at some of the images I even found that there were photographs of traditional Victorian dress and portraits of a mother and her children in front of the family home. Holding them up to the light revealed fairly damaged, but still recognisable images:

So, I took a few rough photographs, uploaded them and inverted the negatives in Photoshop, and transformed them back into black and white as I was unhappy with trying to get the proper black and white of old images - more of a sepia tone. I was absolutely thrilled with the results - I love seeing old photographs like this, a snapshot into another era. I'm definitely going to go back and attempt to get hold of the rest of the plates which this stall had, as they were so reasonably priced, seeing as he thought they were fairly damaged (as I did, until I had a go!). Another triumph for analogue photography - who's going to get this miracle from an image on a computer?