Daguerreotype of Magdalena Hulst, circa 1855, DAG.09; Photography collection; Brooklyn Historical Society.
Digital Photograph taken at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
I personally think that the trip to the Brooklyn Historical Society taught me many new things, especially about daguerreotype photographs. It was exciting to know that we were able to see the daguerreotypes up close. Daguerreotypes are really different from digital photographs. Daguerreotype pictures are pictures that were made with chemicals and the pictures appear on metal plates. When I viewed one of the daguerreotypes, at first you couldn’t see the image, but when I viewed the picture on a different angle, I saw an image of a young woman sitting down. Digital photography is such a dramatic change from daguerreotype. Digital photographs are a stark images with vivid colors, yet daguerreotypes are images that you have to take time to look at to see what they really are, and the decorative frames that they put around these small images are beautiful, and seemed like it took a lot of time to create. This shows the difference of photography and the difference of how much goes into developing a photograph from the 1800’s to now. Overall our visit to the Brooklyn Historical Society was like a step back into the past, and it was a great to view the different daguerreotype pictures.
