Kevin Klein has a hobby of miniaturizing Victorian technology, and recently he made the world’s smallest wet plate camera using 1/32-inch plywood and other wood materials. The camera is only a little bigger than a quarter, and shoots miniature 1/2-inch square plate images.
Here’s a photograph Kleindorf made using the camera:
(via Wet Plate Collodion Forum)
Thanks for sending in the tip, Jim!
Image credits: Photographs by Kevin Klein and used with permission
Have an old Polaroid camera lying around collecting dust? Did you know that you can use it for wet plate collodion photography? AlternativePhotography writes,
Most collodion photographers are using dedicated wet plate cameras, because wet plates are not nice to put into any ordinary modern cameras. There are instructions on how to use some normal medium and large format film cameras in the wet plate process. Most modern large format cameras are readily usable; only a special wet plate holder is needed. The drawback is the silver nitrate, possibly dripping from the holder inside the camera and eventually ruining it.
There are, however, certain types of cameras that you can use as is, without any modifications. Polaroid 100 – 400 series cameras were designed for Polaroid instant pack film, and the empty film holder can be converted to an excellent wet plate holder.
Once your film holder is modified to hold wet plates, you’ll also need to give the camera a makeshift “bulb mode” by covering its ‘Electric Eye’ light meter with black tape. The tutorial also discusses how you can expose wet plates using an enlarger and/or digitally printed film.
Wet plate collodion with a Polaroid camera [AlternativePhotography via Pixel Análogo]
Image credits: Photographs by Jalo Porkkala/AlternativePhotography
Photographer and photography student Eric Omori has an interesting project that combines the modern with the historical. He has been capturing paintball wars using wet plate photography. The project is titled Weekend Warriors.
Here’s what Omori says about project:
Over the past two years I have been making wet plate collodion photographs at local paintball fields in Southern California. By utilizing this civil war era photographic process in relation to paintball, a simulated war game, I am attempting to draw comparisons to art history practices using a more contemporary subject matter. Finding great inspiration from 19th century photographers like Mathew Brady, Timothy O’ Sullivan, and Alexander Gardner I decided to follow the CSULB Paintball team and document them using the wet plate collodion process, exposing my images on clear glass plates. The chemicals used are time sensitive, I have approximately 5-10 minutes to complete the process in complete darkness, while working out a darkroom I built in my car. The collodion process offers a unique look that I love because the resulting image cannot be controlled. The imperfections become apart of the image.
You can find more of Omori’s photography over on his personal website.
Image credits: Photographs by Eric Omori and used with permission
Here’s a video that may be very interesting to you if you’ve never tried your hand at creating a tintype with wet plate collodion photography. Oklahoma City-based photographer Mark Zimmerman recently strapped a GoPro Hero 3 to his head and went through the entire process of creating a wet-plate photo on aluminum, from flowing the collodion in the beginning, through exposing it using his large format camera, and ending with a finished tintype photo of a camera.
Here’s a scan of the resulting 6.5×8.5-inch plate Zimmerman created in the video:
You can find more of Zimmerman’s tintype photos over on his website. Here’s a collection of collodion portraits.
Image credits: Video and photos by Mark Zimmerman and used with permission
Using discarded tin cans found on the hot Arizona desert ground, David Emitt Adams has created timeless pieces he calls Conversations with History. The cans are branded with tintype pictures, reflecting ties to the very locations the cans — some of which have been sitting out in the sun for over forty years — were found.
In the words of Adams, “The deserts of the West also have special significance in the history of photography. I have explored this landscape with an awareness of the photographers who have come before me, and this awareness has led me to pay close attention to the traces left behind by others.”
The cans “have earned a deep reddish-brown, rusty patina. This patina is the evidence of light and time, the two main components inherent in the very nature of photography,” he continues.
Creating the images on the surfaces on the tin cans involve a rather labor-intensive process called wet-plate collodion — which dates back to the 19th century and involves. It’s an interesting process, and one that produces remarkable works of art.
“These cans are the relics of the advancement of our culture, and become sculptural support to what they have witnessed.”
David Emitt Adams is represented by the Etherton Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. See more of his work on his website.
(via JunkCulture)
Image credits: Images by David Emitt Adams and used with permission
Artist Emma Howell‘s landscape images are unlike any we’ve ever run across. Not because she’s capturing something unique, or using a process we’ve not seen before. They are unique because her images, captured using the wet plate collodion method, are exposed directly onto handblown glass vessels she creates herself.
The idea, Howell tells Wired, came to her because she was taking a class in alternative photographic methods and a class in glass blowing at the same time. Sitting there, holing her first glass plate negative in her hand and thinking about her glass blowing class, she realized that the glass didn’t necessarily have to be flat.
It dawned on me that I was holding glass and could potentially change its form, yet photos could be exposed onto it in the same way. I went to the glass department and started blowing forms that were similar to glass plates, but with curved sides that had more of a presence as an object.
Each vessel is exposed in a custom-built camera that Howell designed herself — since your typical large format camera wasn’t made to work with her ‘film’ — and a lot of thought goes into what composition will best compliment each unique ‘plate.’
Here’s a selection of the images she has exposed so far:
Each of these exposures is a labor of love. Carrying her massive camera and all of her darkroom equipment with her, she hikes to each location, mixes chemicals, coats the plate, exposes and develops the image right then and there.
Howell hopes that her unique photographs breathe new life into the landscape genre, turning a photo into an experience.
“Most people are not able to experience a place that is unaffected by the human presence,” she tells Wired. “So I’m creating a way for others to experience this in a way that’s more than looking at a flat print of the cliché beach we all see and know.”
To see more of Howell’s work, head over to her website by clicking here.
(via Wired)
Image credits: Photographs by Emma Howell and used with permission
From Los Angeles based photographer Jamie Johnson comes a unique series of photographs that juxtapose the past and the present in a fascinating way: large format wet plate collodion photos of children writing cheeky modern-day bad deeds on a turn-of-the-century chalkboard.
Titled Vices, Johnson made use of her love for antique, large format cameras and the wet plate collodion process to paint an interesting dichotomy between the young, naive subjects and the humorous bad behaviors they’re trying to avoid.
Vices was photographed with a wet plate collodion process that I feel illustrated the magical innocence of youth alongside the darker recesses of human nature. A vintage perspective on childhood punishments with a little humor.
Below are a collection of the resulting photographs for you to take a look at. The young subjects and their funny “I will not’s” provide that humorous element Johnson was going for, while the darker look of the wet plate collodion process and the vintage chalkboard punishment give the series that dark undertone:
“Beyond the wry wit of her titles and the modern wardrobe of today’s public school hooligans, the photographs themselves form a smart and salient allegory for how the world itself has changed since those allegedly good old days,” writes Shana Nys Dambrot, describing the series for a recent exhibit in LA. “In a very real sense, these are the opposite of iPhone selfies; and they are as much about the history of photography as the narratives they contain.”
To see more of her work — in addition to creative personal projects like these she also shoots documentary work, street and stock photography — head over to her website or follow Verge Photographers on Facebook.
(via Lens Scratch via InspireFirst)
Image credits: Photos by Jamie Johnson and used with permission
Portrait of Charles Dodgson, aka: Lewis Carroll
He’s known as the author behind the famed Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by most, but the breadth of his disciplines goes far beyond literature. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, more commonly known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was also a logician, mathematician, an ordained minister and a photographer… yes, a photographer.
In this article, we’ll share a collection of his work as we dive into his upbringing, his photography career and the controversy that surrounds it to this day.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27th, 1832, in Cheshire, England, to parents Frances Jane and Charles (there were at least four generations in the family with a male named Charles). His early youth consisted of education at home — fairly typical for 19th century children — and his archive of books that were saved through the years show just how promising his intelligence was at an incredibly young age.
However, from the time he could speak, Dodgson suffered from a stammer — a speech impediment that often caused him to stumble over his own words. It was this impediment that led him to Richmond Grammar School. From Richmond Grammar School, Dodgson transferred to Rugby School where, although he showed much dislike towards the sport, he excelled. One particular professor noted “I have not had a more promising boy at his age since I came to Rugby.”
Apterix australis. 1857.
Upon leaving Rugby, Dodgson enrolled at Oxford under a member of his father’s college, Christ Church. But his stay at the school was short-lived. Two days after arriving in his dormitory, Dodgson was sent home after his mother tragically passed away.
As with his early educational career, college proved somewhat difficult for Dodgson as he tried and often failed to balance his enormous intelligence with the repercussions of distraction that often come with it. Ultimately, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts before returning to Christ Church as an educator, where he would work most of the remainder of his life.
From graduation on, Dodgson’s life seems to be a conglomeration of various skills, works and disciplines, almost all of them intertwining to some degree. Of course, from today’s perspective, his most notable career is that of writing, as it cemented his pen name in pop culture. But only acknowledging his literary accomplishments would do him a grave injustice. Which is good for us, because beyond writing, teaching, inventing, painting and mathematics, Carroll also took an interest in photography.
Portrait of Irene MacDonalds. 1863.
In the days when photography was just starting to establish itself as an art form, Dodgson took notice of the extremely precise and mathematical aspects of it. Influenced by his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge and his friend Reginald Southey, he picked up the hobby and — as with just about everything he tried in his life — he excelled almost immediately.
Throughout his 24-year career as a photographer he became a master of the medium, boasting a portfolio of roughly 3,000 images and his very own studio. His subjects were most often people, although he also photographed landscapes, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, trees and even skeletons, as seen above.
Portrait of Xie Kitchin. 1874.
Dodgson considered making it more than just a hobby in the early years of his photographic career, but nothing ever came of it, and to this day we have no idea why. In 1880 Dodgson ended his photo career after the dry-plate process replaced the wet collodion process he had spent so many years mastering. It’s been said that he believed the switch to the dry plate process made photography too easy; so much so that anyone could do it (sound familiar?).
How is it then, that after an extremely successful 24-year career in photography and with a portfolio consisting of over 3,000 images, many people have never known of “Lewis Carroll” as a photographer? Well, there are a few possible reasons, two of which stand out.
The first is that much of his photographic portfolio is missing. Fewer than 1,000 images have survived. And while there’s no definitive reason for this, my research indicated that time is to blame and has destroyed much of his work, as the wet collodion process wasn’t always permanent.
But it wasn’t just time that destroyed his work. It seems many of his photographs have been deliberately ‘erased,’ similar to how many of his writings have been cut and ripped out of his journals, which leads us to the next point.
From around the 1930s on, biographers and scholars alike have questioned the motivation and nature behind Dodgson’s relationship with the younger females in his life.
While nothing is certain at all, it’s widely known that many of the subjects in his writing, as well as his photography and paintings, were young girls… usually between the ages of 10-15. Speaking specifically to his photographic work, it’s said that over half of his remaining portfolio depicts young girls, many of whom are nude or semi-nude.
His affection for younger girls, many of whom inspired the stories he wrote, has led many to hint at or downright conclude that Dodgson may very well have been paedophilic in nature.
Portrait of Alice Liddell. 1859.
The young girl most often associated with these claims is none other than Alice Liddell (pictured above), daughter of a family friend of Dodgson. In both his writings and photographic work, she and characters in her likeness came up consistently — most notably as the inspiration for the protagonist in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland — despite him saying any connection was merely coincidental.
And not only was the use of Liddell in his works part of the controversy, Liddell later named one of her own children Caryl, a name rather similar to Dodgson’s pseudonym. However, as did Dodgson, Liddell claimed it was merely coincidental.
The entire controversy is an almost century-long debate, and one that doesn’t seem to be making any major progress in either direction. And so we’ll drop the debate and focus on the photography instead.
Below are a few more photographs from his collection:
Portrait of Thomas Combe. 1860.
Portrait of Edith (left), Lorina (center) and Alice (right) Liddell. 1860.
Portrait of Alice Liddell. 1858.
Portrait of Alexander Munro & wife (left) Portrait of Arthur Junior Hughes (right).
We may never know who Charles Dodgson was on a psychological level. But as someone who is known to the public ONLY as a writer, it’s fascinating to discover that he spent two and a half decades making a name for himself as a prolific photographer.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this look into the unknown photographic life of Charles Dodgson, or rather Lewis Carroll. I’ve linked as many sources as I came across while writing this article, so if you’d like to take a more in-depth look at his life, I would highly suggest doing so. He was a brilliant man of many trades, whose life is full of interesting work.
Image credits: Images by Charles Dodgson, courtesy of Amadelio
Two years after photographer Ian Ruhter tried to capture photographs of the Yosemite Valley using the world’s largest wet plate collodion camera and suffered a “devastating failure,” he decided to chase this seemingly impossible dream again.
Called Silver & Light, the initial project took a turn towards the worst when Ruhter’s methods for developing the photographs didn’t go as planned.
Crushed that his project failed and, in fact, didn’t yield any results at all (let alone the ones he was hoping for) it took him a year and a half to perfect the process and build up the courage to once again return to the beautiful scenes that had taunted him from the back of his truck–turned–camera/darkroom.
The latest film is aptly titled Yosemite, and follows his second attempt to capture the scenery around him using the behemoth wet plate collodion camera. In the film, Ruhter explains how and why he is attempting the project again, and also why it means so much to him to give it another shot.
“Maybe you can’t just show up here and just be amongst these great photographers,” he says. “Maybe you have to pay your dues. I’m sure they experienced hard times, and I never factored that in, and I don’t think anyone does because you just see the end product of the good days.”
Yosemite is a joy to watch, both for the inspirational story of perseverance and for the resulting images. If you’d like to keep up with Ruhter and his projects, you can do so over on his site, his Tumblr, his Instagram, or his Facebook Page.
Kevin, 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2010.
Keliy Anderson-Staley is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Houston. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, the California Museum of Photography and the Portland Museum of Art, and is currently on view at the Houston Center for Photography.
Her book of portraits, On a Wet Bough, is forthcoming from Waltz Books. She is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery.
Keliy (self-portrait), 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2014.
PetaPixel: First off, Keliy, talk about the influences — either current or from the past — who have really helped to shape your work.
Keliy Anderson-Staley: There are many photographers whose work I love, but my most direct influences come from the world of portraiture.
One is Mike Disfarmer, who I started looking at a lot when I was living in Arkansas (where he worked as a small town portrait photographer in the 30s, 40s and 50s). His studio practice was a little rough around the edges, but he had a distinctive style that transcended his practice as a local portrait photographer. I am particularly struck by his emphasis on the ordinary, on the plain, on the slightly odd.
Portraiture struggles sometimes to be taken seriously as an art form, so the artists who really elevate it to that status are ones I really admire: Felix Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Malik Sadibe, Dawoud Bey, Diane Arbus, Carrie Mae Weems and Thomas Ruff.
Weiting and Ruowei, 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2012.
PP: You’re well-known for your tintype photographs. Why decide to work with such an antiquated process? Why use tintype specifically, rather than, say, the daguerreotype or calotype processes?
K.A-S: When I made my first tintypes more than ten years ago, I had already been working with other historic processes. In college I had also experimented with Liquid Light (a paint-on silver emulsion) to print images onto baking pans, so I was always interested in thinking about the photograph as something other than just an image on paper. I was predisposed to fall in love with this process — with its messiness, with the hands-on nature of the process, with its implicit history.
I’ve tried daguerreotype. It’s a laborious and dangerous process, and I don’t love the resulting mirrored surface — they are hard images to see except from certain angles. Tintypes, on the other hand, have a real solid presence on the wall, and the eyes stare out at you.
I do love other historic printing processes, especially cyanotype and Van Dyke brown. I’ve used them for specific projects, but I keep coming back to the collodion process, especially to make portraits.
Carlos, 10×10″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2014.
PP: I saw those baking pan images on your website, and they’re unusual, compelling, and fascinating pictures. What was the idea behind them?
K.A-S: The pans were part of my thesis project as an undergraduate student at Hampshire College. The project is titled an “Incomplete Family History.” I was working with the baking pans because of their connection to domestic life, family and my identity as a woman. They were all rusted (I collected them over several months at junkyards and thrift stores), so I was able to evoke ideas of time, decay, and the fading of memory.
The images were family pictures from my mother’s albums that I re-photographed on black and white film and exposed onto the pans using liquid silver emulsion. The pans are meant to be installed in a grid, with one pan almost completely rusted through. This pan represented my biological father who I had never met.
On a personal note, I just recently connected with him, and will be making a tintype portrait of him when I meet him for the first time this summer, so this project has come full circle.
The Baking Pan Series: An Incomplete Family History. Installation view, 2012. Series made 2000.
PP: What is it about you, or your outlook on the world, that draws you to working with alternative processes in the first place? Especially now in this digital age when there are endless amounts of ways to make photographs? Does this preference for antiquated processes carry over anywhere else in your life?
K.A-S: Well, I’m not an old-fashioned person, and I didn’t start working with this process because I have any aversion to modern photography or digital processes. I am really interested in photographic history, though, and this process has been a way for me to engage with that history conceptually.
I like photography from every era, and there is a lot of great work being done digitally. For me, I think the key is to find the process that works best for what you want to say visually. I also grew up off the grid in a log cabin in northern Maine, without electricity or plumbing, so I am used to doing things the hard way.
Jameela, 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2013.
PP: Can you tell us about the history of the tintype process, along with the ‘why’ and ‘how’ it was developed and utilized?
K.A-S: The wet-plate collodion process was invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. The daguerreotype had been invented in 1839. The first collodion images were on glass, but the tintype was invented shortly after (1853), and there is some debate about whether it was an American or a Frenchman who first used a metal (iron) plate.
In terms of the spread of photography as a mainstream medium, tintypes were crucial. They were cheaper than daguerreotypes and less vulnerable to damage than ambrotypes and glass negatives. Photographers set up studios all across the country. People were fascinated by photography and a lot of people thought they should have at least one photo portrait. Even children who died were photographed in postmortem tintypes.
The ubiquity of the process in that period is revealed by the fact that you can find piles of tintypes for sale at nearly any antique shop in the country today.
Shaun and Tim, 8×10″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2014.
PP: We live in an era that’s saturated with a vast multitude of image-making methods, from different film and digital technologies, and with all the variations and modifications that come with them. How does it affect us psychologically when we see an image that looks like it was made over a hundred years ago, even if it was made yesterday?
K.A-S: Not only is every photographic process ever invented still currently in use, but portraiture, in particular, is everywhere. Because of this saturation, I think it is pretty rare that we pause to really look at a face and examine it, the way we might standing in front of a portrait by Vermeer or Eakins.
On some level I think just the seeming antiquity of the tintype image can be jarring. Even the people sitting for the image are frequently surprised by it — they recognize themselves, but also often say they see their grandparents.
The tintype, because it is a positive image, creates a mirror image, so the sitter is seeing himself or herself as they look in the mirror — this is truer to how they know their own face than any other photograph they’ve seen of it. The anachronistic nature of the contemporary tintype forces us to look more intently, to receive it as a portrait, something formal and special.
Sabrina, 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2014.
PP: Let’s talk about your portraits. Who are the people you photograph? What are you looking to draw out of them, and how do you hope viewers connect with your finished pieces?
K.A-S: I photograph anyone and everyone, and I’ve photographed at universities and art institutions all over the country (the California Museum of Photography, the Southeast Museum of Photography in Florida, the Print Center in Philadelphia, Light Work in Syracuse, Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, the Houston Center for Photography, a studio I had for years in Queens, the Art Expo on the Navy Pier in Chicago.) I’ve photographed at least 1500 people in wet plate since 2004, and I’m really grateful for all the people who have participated in my project.
Collodion is an immediate process, like digital or Polaroid, but the image itself captures more than a single instant. The exposures are multiple seconds long, and this duration gives the subjects of the portrait a greater presence — at least I think I see something more present in the portraits. The eyes in each of these portraits stare out intently at the viewer. There is this kind of defiance in each face, a demand to be seen, a challenge to stare back.
In this sense, each person is given a something like a voice, even when they are in a crowd of tintypes, hung salon style as I often show them in my exhibitions. In this way, I hope my images challenge the non-democratic uses of this process in the nineteenth century (the ethnographic studies, typological racial portraits, and the exoticization of others).
Donna and Eddie, 7×7″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2014.
PP: For you, is there a secret to making a compelling portrait? Or is it just experience? Or persistence?
K.A-S: A good portrait makes us want to look at a stranger. We can’t really know a person through an image, but a strong portrait should tell us something about them, make us feel that we know them in some way. My portraits are odd, though, in the sense that they don’t always look like the person, in that features may be distorted or blemishes exaggerated, and they can look “off” in some way, even when they are beautiful.
Ideally, in the studio, I will take several photographs of someone before I am sure I have one I want (this process only lets me make a few over the course of a couple hours — the plate needs to be coated in collodion, sensitized for three minutes in silver nitrate and then developed and fixed before I can move on to the next image). I am often set up in places where people come through quickly and are waiting for a turn, and I only have one chance to make an image of them.
In these cases, experience is crucial. The exposure time needs to be estimated, and it changes with the sun, of course, if we are outside, but different skin tones and hair require different exposure times, and one plate can vary from the next by seconds. So, I need to know what I want, how I want the person to pose, and to be sure to get it on the first try.
There is a degree of persistence, too. It can take a lot of effort to make sure everything comes together just right. Even with years of experience, things go wrong with the chemistry or equipment, and it can be a struggle sometimes to troubleshoot the problem. But that is part of why I love this process. When everything comes together and I get a great portrait, I have a surge of adrenalin and just keep shooting.
Ellen and Pat, 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2010.
PP: You’ve also made still-life tintypes in a series called ‘The Winslow Homer’s Studio Project.’ Give us a brief introduction to Winslow Homer, and how did you come to photograph the objects in his studio? What was your goal?
K.A-S: This was a project I did on commission for the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where the painter Winslow Homer lived and had his studio.
Homer was one of the more important nineteenth-century painters. Like Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, who photographed the Civil War in tintype, Homer documented the war, but he was sending back drawings from the frontlines. The Portland Museum renovated Homer’s studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, and had a retrospective of his work in 2012. They commissioned several photographers working in 19th-century processes to photograph his studio and the ocean view he made so famous in some of his iconic seascapes.
I made some landscape tintypes, but I also thought it would be really interesting to photograph some of the objects they had found in the studio while renovating it (Homer used it as a home and workspace). I photographed the objects as I photograph people — each is a kind of portrait with a shallow focal plane and the subject isolated against the backdrop.
Many of them are quite mundane, though — crumpled cigarette packs, broken plates. There is also a chance none of it actually belonged to Homer — including the artist’s mannequin I photographed — because his family lived in the house for decades after his death.
I was really interested in this ambiguity. The museum had elevated these objects to the status of relics, cataloging them and labeling them in the museum collection, but this was only because of their connection to an artist whose hand may not even have touched them. It was a great opportunity, and I would love to do something similar at another institution.
Objects of Uncertain Provenance: The Winslow Homer Project. Installation view, 2012.
Artist’s Mannequin, from the series Objects of Uncertain Provenance: The Winslow Homer Project. 8×10″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2012.
PP: I heard through the grapevine you’ve just published a new book. What can you tell me about it?
K.A-S: Yes, my book On A Wet Bough, is available for pre-order now from Waltz Books, a small independent publisher dedicated to producing high quality photobooks.
The first edition of On A Wet Bough is a hardbound book limited to 1,000 copies. The book features 85 of my tintype portraits, drawn from ten years of my work in portraiture. It was hard to edit the project down to just 85 images, but I think we were able to put together a really compelling sequence of portraits.
Elizabeth, 10×8″ wet-plate collodion tintype, 2012.
PP: Thank you for your time Keliy
What’s a photographer to do when they’re in possession of a 130-year-old wooden camera and a 100-year-old lens, capable of capturing images using the wet plate collodion process?
Well, if you’re Jonathan Keys, you set out on a mission to document the modern world around you using tools that are all but ancient in the world of photography… and you get spectacular results for your effort.
Roaming the streets of Newcastle, Keys captures the present-day scenery and citizens, juxtaposing the fast-paced, modern world around him with a photographic method that is aesthetically reminiscent of Newcastle’s more humble beginnings.
In all, Keys captures no more than six photographs on a given day due to the labor-intensive process of wet plate collodion photography. He doesn’t seem to mind it though. “it’s definitely far more rewarding than digital photography,” he tells My Modern Met, “because of the time and attention needed for each picture.”
Here is a small sample of Keys wet plate street photography:
Each exposure — from prepping the plate, to exposing the scene, to developing and fixing the final plate — takes about 15 minutes to create, making this a strange choice indeed for street photography. And yet, there’s something about these images that no amount of “retro” post-processing could recreate in earnest, making it all worth it.
To see more of Keys work, be sure to visit his Flickr account by clicking here.
(via My Modern Met)
Image credits: Photographs by Jonathan Keys and used with permission
From portraits to surreal scenes that feel as if they were pulled out of some long-lost storybook, the wet plate collodion photography of Alex Timmermans is unlike any we’ve seen or featured before.
Many wet plate photographers prefer to work from their studios, where they have more control over the exposure they are so painstakingly creating, but time and again we’ve seen that some of the most spectacular results come from taking these age-old processes out into the world where their cumbersome nature goes against every trend in photography today.
We saw this earlier in the week with the week when we featured the wet plate street photography of Jonathan Keys, and we see it again today with the wonderfully surreal work of self-taught Dutch photographer Alex Timmermans:
This behind the scenes photo shows Timmermans at work in the woods, photographing his daughter. A brief glimpse into the hour-long process of creating a single plate:
As you might imagine, given his chosen medium, Timmermans doesn’t really care for digital photography. Speaking of the transition from film to digital, he says, “everything became more predictable… too predictable.”
By comparison, wet plate collodion photography is the antithesis to ‘predictability.’ Little twists of fate, chemistry and even weather often lead to surprising results, and this element of serendipity delights Timmermans as much today as it did the first time he took a wet plate photograph.
To learn more about the man or look through the rest of his captivating collodion portfolio, head over to his website by clicking here.
(via My Modern Met)
About the author: Photographs by Alex Timmermans and used with permission
Skateboard company Element recently put together a wonderful little mini-documentary titled The Road to Wolfboro. In it, a dedicated film crew follows photographer Brian Gaberman around as he shares his fascination of wet plate photography and captures some of the most beautiful scenes across the east cost.
The eight-and-a-half minute begins with Gaberman explaining what it is about the wet plate collodion photographic process that he’s become so enamored with. Citing the negatives’ “almost-liquid” aesthetic quality and the “blood and sweat and tears” that go into making them, Gaberman’s intimacy with the large format process is presented wonderfully.
From there, the documentary follows him as he travels from New York City to Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, retracing the steps of his childhood and capturing some of the most beautiful scenery the east coast has to offer.
Follow Gaberman and his journey to Wolfeboro in the video at the top, and maybe you’ll gather some information and inspiration along the way.
(via ISO 1200)
During past few weeks I have been working on a new picture I had in mind. This time I already knew the title: “The Rain Maker.” It’s a picture made with the collodion photographic process that was invented back in 1851.
I discovered a beautiful antique greenhouse that was flooded at that time, so I asked for permission to use it for my idea and the owner agreed.
I made some clouds and wanted to see these clouds really pour rain during the shoot, so I had to make a construction of tubes and hoses to make that happen.
The first shoot wasn’t a success — the weather conditions weren’t good and somehow the plate wasn’t interesting enough.
During the second shoot everything worked out just perfectly. I used a 26.5×26.5cm plate and a Dallmeyer 16″ antique Petzval lens at f/5.6 with a 2 second exposure.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing the making of “The Rain Maker”:
And here’s the final wet plate image:
About the author: Alex Timmermans is a self-taught wet plate collodion photographer based in Holland. You can find out more about him through his website and blog. We’ve previously featured his work here. This article originally appeared here.
Having failed woodworking at school, probably the worst thing I could have done is venture into the world of wet plate photography.
Back in 2012, I learned the dark art of the silver stuff, just around the time the wave of interest was starting to build worldwide. However, as I live in New Zealand, an island nation, it has taken a while (and is still taking a while) to reach us. As a result, getting anything wet plate-related is quite a task. One does not simply walk into a store and buy a ‘wet plate kit’.
As a result of wet plate collodion, my DIY skills have improved considerably over the past 4 years. To make images, I had to build my own 11 x 11 camera out of mahogany and brass.
11 x 11″ DIY camera
In addition to building the hardware, we (in New Zealand) have to mix our own chemicals, this often leads us to places like the garden centre to source ferrous sulphate, which is used as a moss controller.
For a couple of years, I used my garage as a darkroom, which was great as it was MY garage and I could stain the floor with as much silver as I liked (not that I liked spilling the silver, but unfortunately it does happen).
Literally ‘spilling the silver’
After much rumination, I decided that I could kill 2 birds with one stone by investing in true mobile darkroom, a contemporary version of those towed by the photography pioneers (Brady and Fenton to name but a few). For a few months I trawled out national online auction site to assess various vehicles for suitability. Then in March 2015, a 1970s caravan came up for sale. She had been restored from the exterior, but the interior was ‘as is 1970′. It was perfect and waiting to be turned into a mobile darkroom. With a few clicks of a mouse, I had bought her and she was delivered 2 days later.
On the day of delivery my caravan skills were fairly limited, our car didn’t have a towbar and I had personally never towed anything in my life. Nevertheless, this thing was going to work.
The restored caravan exterior
The 1970s caravan interior
I had a rough plan in my head where things would go, but over the duration of the build it ‘evolved’ as I found things in demolition suppliers or thrift stores. The first find was a dual stainless steel sink, which was marked ‘$350′ in a demolition warehouse. I said to the guy, “will you take sixty?” and to my amazement he said “yes!”. The twin skin was a perfect idea and a perfect fit into the space I had created while ripping out the old 1970s interior.
The next issue was power and water. This old caravan had a 240V hook-up and a hand pump for water, but no 12V and no option for mains pressure water. I had a plan as to how I was going to rewire the caravan to install new lights and move power sockets, so off I enthusiastically (and naively) went off to the DIY store.
After gathering all my wire, powerpoints and conduit, I was miffed to be asked at the checkout “are you a certified electrician?”, to which I replied “no sir.” I was then told, “then I can’t sell you all these electrical goods, go and get yourself an electrician.” To me, all I hear was “go and spend oodles of money on something you could ‘probably’ do yourself.”
On reflection, getting an electrician to help was a wise decision. Caravans are, generally speaking, not very lethal, but 240V potentially is. I installed new lights, and the electrician set about moving the power sockets out of the ‘wet area’.
She’s starting to look a lot like a workspace.
The plumbing was next. I needed to bring mains pressure water from outside (from a garden hose) into the caravan via a tap and there was no way I was enlisting a plumber so I set about researching ways to get the water inside. It was pretty simple really, I ran the mains pressure water through a pressure regulator, then piped it into the caravan to the place where a tap would eventuate.
Unfortunately, there was no pre-drilled faucet holes in this double sink, so here comes the next problem. How does one drill a hole in (very strong) steel? I was told, “you need a chassis punch”, so I looked high and low to see if I could rent one from a local outfit, but no such luck.
Guess what came next? “You need to hire a plumber.” I stuck by my guns and set about arranging a DIY option. Fortunately, I had a mate with a diamond tipped hole drill so he came around and we set to work. After an hour of huffing and puffing, drills and stainless steel so hot you could fry an egg, a hole appeared. She wasn’t pretty, but she was a hole.
Do it yourself stainless steel hole.
240V can be lethal and this caravan had no other options for power so I researched how caravans and campervans were powered whilst on the road, and it seemed the next logical step would be to install a 12V system. After talking to a few caravan specialists, I was pleased to hear this is something I could do myself, so off I went into a crash course on auto electrics.
I learned new words, such as ‘crimping,’ and new skills, like how to wire lights to illuminated rockers switches. All in all, I installed a dimmable LED red safelight system, a Bluetooth sound system, external lighting and an off the grid water pump system.
Darkroom under house lighting
Darkroom under LED safelights
P.I.M.P my darkroom caravan
A few weeks later the caravan was plumbed wired and ready to be towed and used as a work space. I have been told all caravans need a name and as this girl is red from top to toe, what else could she be called? It was a no-brainer: Rubylith (or Ruby) was born. (Rubylith is the name of the red filter used on darkroom safe lights).
Ruby decals
And that’s how I converted an old caravan into a mobile wet plate photography darkroom.
About the author: Paul Alsop is an amateur wet plate collodion photographer based in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. He has had a number of exhibition of his wet plates, and another is lined up for the end of 2015 in Wellington. You can connect with Alsop through his website, Facebook, and Instagram.
Wet plate collodion photographer Alex Timmermans recently shot a new photo titled “Swan Lake” for his surreal Story Telling project. Here’s a look at how the image was made.
Timmermans says that the idea had been bouncing around in his head for months, but the main problem was finding the right location for the shoot. He needed a shallow pond that could support a sturdy platform for the ballet dancer.
He also needed to wait for the right weather: since both the dancer’s dress and the swan were white, he hoped to do the shoot on a cloudy day to have more control over the exposure.
On the day of the shoot, Timmermans decided to use 5 adjustable umbrella stand to prop up his subjects. 4 were used on the dancer’s platform, and one was used to prop up the fake swan.
“Despite the cloudy weather, it was extremely difficult to nail the exposure,” Timmermans writes. “So making this plate took us about 5 hours, but the very final plate came out just great.”
Here’s a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot, filmed by Patrice Lesueur of Lightinanbox:
The resulting “Swan Lake” photo is a 26.5×26.5cm tintype that was shot with a Dallmeyer 5D Petzval lens at f/7 and 1s.
(via Alex Timmermans via Phogotraphy)
P.S. We featured a collection of Timmermans’ photos back in 2014, and earlier this year he shared a behind-the-scenes look at a different photo in the series.
Image credits: Photographs by Alex Timmermans and used with permission
Want to see how wet-plate collodion photography is done but have the attention span of a goldfish? Our buddy Sam Cornwell over at Phogotraphy has created an unusual step-by-step wet plate walkthrough — everything is crammed into a 6-second Vine video.
Here it is for your enjoyment:
We see everything from preparing the wet plate with collodion, loading it into the camera, taking a photo, and then developing the plate in the darkroom. It’s a 17-step process demonstrated in 6 seconds — or about 2.8 steps per second.
If you’d like a longer and more serious look at the process, here’s an 11-minute walkthrough from a first-person point of view.
P.S. Goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds. If yours is shorter, don’t worry: you’re not alone. A recent study found that the average human attention span has dropped to 8 seconds.
Last week, RIT photography professor Willie Osterman held the 2015 RIT Photo MFA picnic in the front yard of his home in Bristol, New York. To commemorate the gathering, he pulled out a giant camera to shoot a wet plate collodion ambrotype portrait of the group.
On the other side of the camera, in the group, was fellow photo professor Frank Cost with a DJI Inspire camera drone. Cost used the drone to capture the wet plate shooting process from a subject’s point of view before lifting off into the sky for a bird’s-eye view. The drone was also captured in the resulting wet plate from the last portrait attempt.
Image credits: Video and still frames by Frank Cost, wet plate collodion photo by Willie Osterman
Love the look of wet plate collodion photographs? Did you know you can give any digital photo that same look using Photoshop? It’s a technique that can be learned in about 10 minutes.
Retoucher Antti Karppinen is starting a new YouTube channel called Alias Academy, and his first video tutorial is on how he recreates the look of wet plate using Photoshop:
“I really like the look and feel of these kind of images,” Karppinen writes. “For me the basic photograph is the starting point and I try to capture people as they are. Then I go ahead and try to create something more, and for this series I have tried to capture bit more of that old feel to the images.”
In the tutorial, Karppinen steps through the different layers he used to turn this digital portrait:
…into this wet plate collodion look-alike:
One of the biggest steps in the process is using Channel Mixer, setting the image to monochrome, and then boosting the Red, Green, and Blue channels in order to make the photo “pop” and bring out the details of your subject’s face.
Here are a few more faux wet plates created using this same technique:
Subscribe to Alias Academy on YouTube if you’d like to stay updated on future video tutorials like this one. You can also find more of Karppinen’s work on his website and in previous posts we’ve published.
How small can you go when it comes to wet plate collodion photography? Photographer Anton Orlov of The Photo Palace recently experimented with this question by shooting thumbnail-sized 8x11mm tintypes using an old Minox subminiature camera — a model A III from the 1950s.
Orlov had quite a few of the Minox cameras in his collection, so he decided to dedicate one of them to experimental tintype photography. Once silver nitrate is put through the camera, it eats away at the metal surfaces and makes the camera unusable for film, Orlov says.
The Minox A III has a 15mm f/3.5 lens and flash X-sync, so Orlov was able to pair it with a Photogenic 1500 monolight. For a plate, Orlov used extremely thin japanned iron sheets that can be inserted into the Minox’s narrow film slot. A pipette was needed to apply small quantities of developer to the plate.
Orlov exposing the plates.
After two attempts, Orlov successfully created a super small wet plate portrait of his friend Justin.
Here’s a closeup of the photo that shows its details:
Orlov says that Stanhopes from 1857 technically created smaller 2x2mm wet plate collodion photos, but they were created by exposing dozens of photos onto a larger plate and then cutting the plate into micro plates.
“I still think these plates stand as being the smallest poured without cutting,” Orlov says.
He’s now experimenting with coating tiny strips of B&W film with collodion, shooting negatives, and then creating 5×7 enlargements:
35mm black-and-white film cut into tiny strips, cleared with fixer before being coated with collodion.
An exposed, processed, and dried negative.
A resulting enlargement, a 5×7 print that was treated with a strong selenium toner “to make it a little more interesting.”
You can follow along with Orlov’s analog experiments over on The Photo Palace. He previously made a transparent wet plate camera.
P.S. Orlov’s camera isn’t the world’s smallest wet plate camera. That would be Kevin Klein’s camera, a custom-built thumbnail-sized wooden camera that’s used to create 1/2-inch square plates (12.7×12.7mm). Last year, we also featured tintypes created with a 110 camera.
Also, on the other end of the size spectrum, check out Ian Ruhter’s 36×24-inch wet plates that are exposed using his giant van camera.
Image credits: Photographs by Anton Orlov and used with permission
