I've currently got a book checked out from the library, "Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957." It is a really nice book. The photography is broken into four parts, the first part devoted exclusively to images by Carleton Watkins, all of which I assume is wet plate. In most of the images, water, or smoke from steam engines, smokestacks, etc., is blurred as I would expect it to be - I had assumed wet plate required fairly long exposures. But there is one image of a rapid, and another of a blast, where the motion is fairly "frozen." I guess wet plate exposures can, in fact, be fairly short?
As an aside, the most lovely, in my opinion, images in the book were made by two women, Lily E. White and Sarah Hall Ladd. The one flaw in the book is that there is one set of 13 pages missing, and a few duplicated. I'd suggest anyone interested in the history and/or photography of the region request the book on interlibrary loan. Apparently copies were donated to every public library in Oregon.
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