The conventional wisdom these days seems to be that people are mean-spirited, selfish and “looking out for number one”. We are cautioned to be cautious, to never expect “something for nothing”. We all know that “you get what you pay for”. Well I’ll tell you, at least in the small corner of the world related to Daguerreotypes that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. In my research I am seeing post after post where people in the know go out of the way to help beginners. Entire articles are written that seem to exist only to help people out. Payment to the author? Zero as near as I can figure out.

Case in point: I was going through some postings on photo.net and I came across a mention by Tyler Robbins that he had a picture of an iodine fuming box that he had made put up on his blog page. Since I am interested in that I clicked through and found this helpful picture. I also wondered if Tyler would point me to the information he used to design the box. So I wrote him an email. I didn’t really expect much. In fact, truth be told, I didn’t expect a reply.

Well, cut to the chase – I was surprised again. Not only did Tyler write back some helpful information, he also offered to take some additional views of his fuming box and send them to me. The photos arrived in short order. I have posted them in my gallery here. I see from his bio on the photo.net site that Tyler is an MFA student in Photography at UW Madison. Now I don’t know him, but I can imagine he has a number of things to occupy his time that are more interesting than taking photos of his fuming box to send to a complete stranger who wrote him out of the blue.

But he did it anyway. Maybe I’ve got the wrong take on such things, but it still surprises me. In fact it really makes my day.

Thanks Tyler. Good luck in your photography career.

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