For many years I have been on a lookout for photographs of years gone by. Some of the photographs I could still readily find were tintypes . First to appear in the late 1850s they were the snapshots of their period. Most of the images taken were portraits, and of course many of them were of children. The following samples are rather of babies.
Babies represent an extra challenge to the photographer.
If you carefully study the tintypes below you will be able to trace some of the methods. The first tintype on the left might be the extreme. It is a sample of postmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, a common practice in the ninteenth and early twentieth century. For a larger size image click on the thumbnails above. It was essentially an ambrotype made on a piece of thin sheet iron that had been enameled black or brown-black.