With our reasonably recent discovery of actual glass plate negatives exposed by Lloyd Mifflin, revelations have occurred regularly—finding common components in a number of images no one had written about previously and—a lucky break for us—the joy of finding snippets of hand-written notes with many of the Lloyd Mifflin negatives. Hand-written by Lloyd, himself? Well, we're assuming so, but he could've employed an assistant, as the equipment was quite difficult to handle. It seems to me, however, that if I needed to record technical notes in hopes of gathering better exposure information for the future, I'd be taking those notes myself (being a photographer myself). So, I'm sticking with the belief they're written by Lloyd. One of them is shown here, along with its accompanying unretouched image.
One can tell that he quickly snipped off a piece of scrap from an unneeded piece of ephemera he'd received from, oh, a bank or creditor, and put it to better use. He names the location (too generically, in my opinion... 'Dam derrick'), the condition of the weather ('fair'), the length of the exposure ('2 seconds'), the f-stop ('32'), the lens (I'm assuming... named 'Jersey'), the actual time of the day ('12:10'), and the date ('October 15, 1899'). Just absorbing those little bits of info makes me feel the moment of the exposure.
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