Last week, it was the boys in front of the corn. This week, the parents join in for a family portrait. Mrs. and Mr. John B. Capewell of Westville, New Jersey are seated in a lodge pole loveseat with Henry O. in Mom’s lap and John, Jr. in Dad’s. It’s probably a beautiful day on John’s brother’s farm some time between 1909 and 1911.

Notice that John, Sr.’s hand is a blur of motion. It looks as if he’s working his string trick as he had in some of the other negatives. He had a length of string attached to the camera’s shutter release. A quick tug and the photographer photographs himself as well as his subjects.

Here is the entire image from the glass negative:

***UPDATE***

I ended up hearing from Steve Atkinson, an antique glass collector and an amateur glass historian. He was researching the Capewell family’s glass works along with other glass factories in the Delaware Valley. He came across my series of Capewell negatives and offered to fill in the blanks in my sketchy history of the family. As it turns out, the people who owned the glass works were indeed related to the people in my glass negatives. It’s very exciting.

Mr. Atkinson and fellow antique glass enthusiasts contribute to a forum on glass collecting. The forum thread particular to the Capewells in these photographs can be found HERE. It’s packed with beautiful images of antique glassware and information about the folks who made that glass. Fascinating stuff! Check it out!

As with all of the photographs in the Capewell Collection Glass Negative Collection, I placed this 5″ x 7″ glass negative on a lightbox and shot it with a digital camera locked down on a tripod. The “processing” was done digitally on a Mac using Adobe Photoshop.

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