Before this reading, I personally associated older methods of photography with tintypes. I feel like this is because I associated tintypes with the stereotype that people usually hold toward photos – that they are efficient, objective, and develop as quick as the press of a button. What I never really considered before was how different methods of photography’s exposure times determine a photo’s ideal use and audience. I always grouped all photography into a category defined by modern digital photography’s traits, however reading about methods like dry collodion or Raman plates allowed me to see past this. These ways allowing photographers to capture multiple exposures in series or keep an image exposed for longer periods of time really demonstrated its effectiveness in scientific or military research as compared to more conventional street portraiture of the tintypes.
An opportunity I find interesting is how we can start to mimic older scientific photography methods (like Maria Sibylla Merian’s botanical drawings) which they state in the reading “rely on an entirely different understanding of truth”. These images capture specimens throughout time in different stages of their lives all within one composition. I am interested in how we can mimic these observational drawings with modern day photography thanks to the science behind capturing and layering multiple exposures together in one image.