Due to the long exposure times of Victorian photography, the mothers of children getting a portrait done would be camouflaged into the scenery.

Due to the long exposure times of Victorian photography, the mothers of children getting a portrait done would be camouflaged into the scenery.

If you know a bit about the history of photography, you might know that it got off to a rocky start. While today photographs can be taken in less than a second, when photography was first being developed as technology, it took hours to get a photograph. In order to capture anything on film, the early cameras of the 1820s had to take several hours. 

Throughout the 19th century, the technology developed into something much more useful and efficient. The exposure time was eventually cut down into just a few minutes, and then a few seconds before reaching where it is today. Photographing people was a bit of an ordeal, understandably. For adults, a long exposure time was less of a problem. 

Any adult can sit still for a period of time, though typically these photographs were taken without smiles simply because it’s hard to give a convincing smile over a long period of time. For children, the mothers often had to hold them still. What this often meant was that mothers had to be hidden, disguised as chairs or (as pictured on the right) just sitting under a sheet.

 Of course this was only when the pictures were meant to be just of the children. Another method of photographing children is considerably more eerie. Sometimes, children would be photographed after they died, just so that they would be sitting still. 

(Source)

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