I love daguerrotypes, they’re such a vivid look into the past. Exposures outdoors in bright sunlight only took a few seconds, but as this one appears to be taken indoors he would have indeed needed to stand there for quite a while. That’s probably why his left hand is blurry (he’s holding the flag in his right hand - daguerrotypes were laterally mirrored).

Also, see the faint parallel lines all over the picture? Those are faint marks made by the photographer as he was polishing the plate just prior to sensitizing it and loading it into the camera.

I don’t know where this meme format came from but I love it

Man, there’s something about the color balance and lighting that just screams Monty Python sketch to me.

At first I thought it was NCD memery, e.g. “Ukrainian soldiers cobble together a nuke from a car they find lying around” so imagine my surprise when I see it’s a real headline. Even though “hydrogen bomb” is technically correct, it certainly made me do a double take. I wonder if that choice of words was intentional.