On the road, Beato needed pack animals to lug glass plates and bottles of chemicals, many of which were highly flammable. He prepared the glass negatives in a makeshift darkroom. While the plate was still wet, he placed the plate in the camera, exposed it, and then rushed back to his “darkroom” to fix the plate before it dried—all in around five minutes. Glass-plate negatives and albumen prints produce sharp, highly detailed photographs, as did the fact that they were contact prints, made by placing a negative directly on treated paper and exposing it.