The Taney House, in downtown Frederick , is featuring the exhibition “Only Two Sides to the Question: The Bitter Disagreements of Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney” on Saturdays and Sundays until late fall.

Jennifer Winter of the Historical Society of Frederick County, which oversees the Taney House, said she got the idea for the one-day photography exhibition and real-time demonstration Saturday, July 25 with Todd Harrington from the 150-year-old photos of Lincoln and Taney — the fifth chief justice of the United States — in the ongoing exhibition.

“Taney was born in 1777, and he’ll die in 1864. His life transcended across the period before and after the new technology of photography, which is one that we still have today and all Americans can identify with,” Winter said. “I thought it would it be interesting to track the development and changes in photography during that time.”

The exhibition includes photographs from the Historical Society of Frederick ‘s collection. It includes a copy of an 1806 painted portrait of Taney, and two smaller silhouette portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fogler from 1813. It was the only means available at the time for people to hold on to images of their loved ones.

Made by polishing a silvery surface into a mirrorlike plate and using a chemical emulsion, early daguerreotype photographs at the Taney House portrayed a Confederate soldier and Union soldier sitting with their arms around each other and a 3-year-old girl in a white dress from Frederick named Ariana Teresa Trail.

According to Harrington’s Web site, collodianartistry.com, wet-plate photography, invented in 1851, surpassed the daguerreotype process as the predominant photographic medium in use by the end of the decade.

“As the name implies the process relied on maintaining a wet plate throughout the process thus limiting the time a photographer has to work with a sensitized plate,” Harrington’s Web site explains. “Even with these technical drawbacks, the 19th-century photographers were able to bring an immediacy of image never before seen.”

The heyday of the wet-plate process lasted into the 1880s, when gelatin silver prints techniques became available — a process that was used throughout the 20th century and is still used today, Winter said.

The wet-plate medium demonstrated by Harrington with his boxy, bellow-style field cameras — complete with requisite black cape — still provides a unique canvas to capture both historic recreations of mid-19th-century life and modern subject matter.

“Sometimes the images just pop,” Harrington said. “Collodion photography has the highest resolution of any photography out there. In pictures at the Library of Congress archives you can read the writing on a dead soldier’s buttons lying way out in a field.”

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Information from: The Frederick (Md.) News-Post, http://www.fredericknewspost.com found at http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/ap/52578822.html