In the unlikely scenario that you one day find yourself delivering an inaugural address, there are a few things you should know. Our systematic and scientific analysis of past inaugural addresses has yielded 11 easy steps to the perfect speech.

Inauguration Mashup: The Speech In 11 Easy Steps

Video Credit: Produced by: Claire O’Neill and Adam Cole

Photo Credit: Claire O’Neill/NPR

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of food involved in wet-plate photography. Egg whites (albumen) are used to make the glass plates adhesive to the light-sensitive chemicals. And one way to keep the plates from drying out after processing is to coat them in honey. It’s also physically demanding, so you get really hungry.

These are the things I learned in the field with wet-plate photographer Todd Harrington. For the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, we asked him to retrace the steps of Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. We wanted to capture the same scenes with the same equipment — to see how things have changed. (Kind of like the nerd’s version of Dear Photograph.)

Same Camera, Different Century: Capturing Civil War Sites, 150 Years Later