Eagle Point, 4000 Ft., Yo-Semite Valley

Beginning in the 1850s, photographers found a way to achieve the clarity of daguerreotypes without giving up the reproducibility inherent in Talbot's process: they replaced the paper negative with glass, which they coated with a thin layer of wet photosensitive collodion. For large-format landscape work such as Weed's views of Yosemite Valley in California, the physical demands of this process were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, the glass negatives had to be as large as the photographer wished the prints to be and the camera had to be large enough to accommodate the plates. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed while the collodion remained tacky, which meant the photographer had to transport a traveling darkroom.
Although Weed's career is less well documented than those of his contemporaries and chief rivals Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, he was the first to photograph the Yosemite region, where he went in June 1859 to make stereograph views. In 1864 he made mammoth-plate photographs in the valley for the San Francisco photographic publishing firm of Lawrence and Houseworth, and in 1872 he returned once more, accompanied by Muybridge. It was probably on this last trip that he photographed Eagle Point, recording the rugged mountain peak and the wooded stretch of river below it with amazing clarity.