Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Happy Easter

Picture of Jesus and two children from a Swedish Bible
Among the pictures that our family photographers re-photographed is this page from a Swedish Bible. You can see the thumbtacks where the page was tacked on a board to photograph it. (Just like the earlier family pictures shown in post:  Saving and Sharing Family Photos ).  I remember my mother telling me that her mother (Nellie Paulson Hawkinson) had a print copy of this which she had hand colored.  My mom thought that the copy that we have was the one that her mother had colored. Actually our print copy is the original page of the Bible.

Why was this picture photographed? We can only speculate. Both Amy and Nellie Paulson were Sunday School teachers. Perhaps copies were made for their classes. The picture was photographed at least tree times (three separate glass negatives), one on a standard 4"x5" glass plate and two on odd size plates of about 3 1/4" x 4".

Identifiers:
Negative: paulson1003 (3 14" x 4" negative, scanned in 1200 bpi tiff, downsized to 400 bpi jpeg for this post).
Other negatives of this picture:  paulson004, paulson1002

People:
Nellie Pauline Paulson Hawkinson: 15 Feb 1883 - 28 Mar 1958.
Amy Justina Paulson Anderson: 10 Dec 1881 - 18 Oct 1918
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2 comments:

  1. Wes A HollandApril 4, 2013 at 6:40 AM

    Any speculation on why the other 2 sizes? The 4x5 is understandable. With the SS reference it seems like they were practicing an early method to "photocopy", pretty slick.

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    Replies
    1. Bet IsonMay 15, 2013 at 8:58 PM

      Darn, Wes. I just realized with all the "away from home" time I've spent recently. I missed this comment earlier.
      I think that both 4x5 and 5x7 are standard sizes. I'm curious about the other sizes too. And I'm also curious as to whether different cameras were used for each size. Most of the 5x7 ones are from a little later - about the time Amy Paulson was working in a photography shop (circa 1909-1910). But I just posted one that was taken earlier (1903-05).
      I was thinking maybe cost of the larger size was more prohibitive? Finally - maybe they were used for different reasons. All of the prints for these that our family has that were made at the time were "contact " prints - the same size as the original picture. Many of the 4x5 pictures were printed on postcard paper and sent as postcards. While the 5x7s were more frequently mounted for the wall or put into albums.
      I still have a lot to learn.

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