prokopetz:

null-the-feral-moff:

whitebookposts:

justanotherweirdarchaeologist:

jaubaius:

Found in a 120 year old time capsule.

Full VDO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDj4mXdqmc

Worth it.

I’m sorry I might sound like a madwoman for going on a rant about this but man, it’s…
I don’t know how to express it but just the thought of some person, 120 years ago, taking a photo of their cat, which back then wasn’t easy - they didn’t have phones with cameras, each photo required a lot of time and dedication, so not only the person “wasted” a whole photo on their cat, they also did their fricking best to save this photo and carefully put it into an envelope to preserve it so that people in the future will know that there was this cat and it looked like this and it’s owner thought the cat looked lovely that day so much that they decided to take a photo of it and then they loved the photo so much that they went out of their way to preserve it for future generations like “hello people from the future! this is what my cat loos like!” because they loved their cat so much they wanted people from the future to know about it is… crazy to me… and here we are, 120 years later, long after the cat and it’s owners passed away, looking at an old photo of a cat and gushing about it. The cat died so long ago and wouldn’t even know it existed if not for the owner that loved their cat so much that they decided this photo was worth preserving and put it into a time capsule. and seeing now how people dedicate whole blogs to their cats and take countless pictures of them just to show to other people really hits because you realize that in the end, people from today aren’t that much different from people that were 120 years ago. We all just love our cats and want people to look at them.

I bet this woman was imagining the photo may be seen by like… a family some day. But no. It survived till the age of the internet. It has now transcended the original media. It is now being seen by far more eyes in far more places than the media she chose would normally allow.

I hope the taker of this 120 year old photo is PROUD.

I feel it’s worth pointing out that the thing in the time capsule isn’t a photograph – it’s a glass-plate negative.

For those unfamiliar with non-digital photography, how it works is when you take a photo, what you’re doing is exposing a transparent medium that’s been treated with a light-sensitive chemical that darkens when exposed to light. This results in a negative image of whatever you’re photographing: dark where the light was bright, and transparent where the light was dim. The negative is then treated with a fixative chemical that renders it insensitive to further light exposure, and the actual photograph is produced by shining a bright light through the fixed negative and onto a sheet of paper treated with the same light-sensitive chemical. In this way, a single negative can be used to produce many copies of the same photograph. This is the process shown in the video.

In other words, the person who stored the time capsule away didn’t preserve a photo of their cat: they preserved the tools necessary to mass produce photos of their cat. It’s not unreasonable to suppose they did, in fact, hope that many copies of it would be made – though they probably did not anticipate exactly how many there would be!

i hope that cat had a happy life along with whoever took the picture