During the spring term of the Circuit Court in 1858, Abraham Lincoln sat for a portrait with photographer Samuel Alschuler in Alschuler’s studio on the second floor of the Lowenstern Building at the southwest corner of Main and Race streets in downtown Urbana, where the Busey Bank Building stands today. According to Urbana judge J. O. Cunningham, Lincoln had been wearing a light colored duster, but because light colors did not photograph well, Alschuler offered his own jacket for the portrait. Cunningham later recalled that Alschuler was a very short man with short arms but a body nearly as large as Lincoln’s, so Lincoln’s arms extended through the sleeves of Alschuler’s coat a quarter of a yard, making him appear ludicrous and causing him to laugh immoderately before sitting for the picture with great effort at looking sober enough for the occasion. The resulting portrait was one of the earliest known photographs of the future sixteenth president. The photograph was an ambrotype, a successor to the daguerreotype, made by under-exposing collodian on a glass negative backed by a black background so that it appeared positive. Ambrotypes were easier and less expensive to produce than daguerreotypes and were popular through the late 1850's. Lincoln was probably the first presidential candidate to realize the potential of photography and to exploit its power. According to Meserve and Sandburg, the Mathew Brady photograph and the Cooper Union speech of February 27, 1860, were critical to Lincoln’s successful campaign for the presidency, and Lincoln himself said that this speech and these photographs helped him to the White House.