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Photo imaging during the Civil war was done by photographers that made a profession of it. Studios in large cities were set up and some photographers took their equipment on the road to the camps and captured images of soldiers for a price that depended on the process used. The soldiers seem to have had their images taken more for commeration of military service than for identification. These images were usually sent home and remained in the family until very often loss of identification and lack of interest in geneology the decendents sold the image. The vast majority of the images of Civil War soldiers the person in the image is unidentified or misidentified.

So the image you saw or know to have existed was most likely with a relative. That is likely your only resource for obtaining an image of your relative unless he was a very prominent politician, military leader, businessman or government official. There are several resources for obtaining images of well known people including the National Archives, Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution to name a few.

The most popular and relatively inexpensive images were Ambrotypes, Deguerrotypes, Ferro types (commonly called tin types) and Albumn print process used for Carte de Visites.

Ambrotypes and Deguerrotypes were both processes in which clear glass plates were wet coated with chemicals and then promptly processed and the final image was etched into the surface of the glass. These processes produce one image that could not be replicated then.

Ferro types were also a wet plate process using chemically treated sheet steel and the final image is reversed because the front of the plate is exposed to the lens.

Albumn paper printing was accomplished using a glass negative to produce a positive image on a relatively stable paper that was usually pasted to a thin card stock about the size of a calling card. The glass negative could be re-used, so often people would have a number of these images printed and would present them as mementos and sometimes use them much in the same way as business cards or "Cartes de Visite" (Visiting cards). Glass is of course fragile and the glass negatives used to make albumn prints were rarely preserved.