Written and Photographed by Anton Tintype

200mm Zoom Crop

Since I was 12, the photographic darkroom has been the place where my experience of this world is visually transcribed, aided by a varying blend of art and science. After moving to the US at the age of 17, I received a B.F.A. from SJSU in ‘06. Currently working in alternative processes, with a focus on wet plate collodion and daguerreotype. My work and writing can be found at http://thephotopalace.blogspot.com

My inspiration always came from light, visible or not. On a subatomic scale, matter is not that different than light. The photographic syntax allows a conscious iteration of light, you or me, to use certain spectrums of light in combination with chemical properties of certain substances, to capture a wholly unique moment of existence, and preserve it for centuries. Nothing I can think of comes closer to the visceral experience of living in that captured moment than the hand making the direct positive photographic image, crafted on location. In order to continue clarifying my voice within the art form I hold dearest, I must challenge myself to push onward, and explore not only the world around me but various tools and methods as well. Challenging oneself to explore new angles, ideas, subject matter, technique, and equipment leads to a deeper connection with what that one’s journey is, and lets one communicate it via greater pallet and higher precision. Thus, after lightly restoring a 145-year-old collodion filed camera, it’s first wet plate images after a century of slumber, were made on location in Yosemite National Park. This was done to commemorate the spirit of photographers, who traversed the harsh land in the mid-19th century and to channel my own take on the glory of its existence.

All images are 8x10 inches, unique direct positive tintypes, made with wet plate collodion in full accordance with the 19th-century practice, with the exception of modern black aluminum backing.

Camera – mid-1870s American Optical Co., division of Scovill Manufacturing Company,

Lenses – Dallmeyer Triple Achromat 8in, 14in James Queen single achromat, 21in Voigtlander Euryscope

Location – Yosemite National Park, California, February 18, 2020.

To see all 9 plates, plus a daguerreotype completed the following day, visit this Facebook Album!

Please consider purchasing one of those original plates for yourself, it will enable me to keep creating more work, and to keep sharing my vision of beauty with the world!

50mm Normal View

50mm is so boring… here’s the ‘normal’ view. There’s a time and place for it, but aren’t we better off stepping outside ‘normal’ more often than most of us usually do? I think so.

21mm Wide Angle

For the past 30 years, my life has been fully dedicated to the art and craft of analog photography, as a means of recording and sharing limitless beauty contained in this experience of reality. At its core, photography has an innate and perfect feature, which separates it from other branches of the arts. It gives us the ability to accurately distill a singular moment, in reality, that one unrepeatable moment, through a lens of our individual vision and imagination. Should the artist’s vision be clear and concise, it seems only sensible that in search of success, tools and process must be chosen mindfully and with care. The moment is as unique as our experience of it, and what can bring us closer to such uniqueness than a direct positive image? Photons reflected from the scene before us, impress themselves once and for all in a permanent metallic structure. Each semblance is one of a kind, and just like in life, there are no do-overs.

The first two photographic processes widely practiced were daguerreotype and wet plate collodion. While daguerreotype is a solely direct positive method, with collodion one can make direct positives, called tintypes when made on metal, ambrotype on glass, or in fact negatives for later printing. Both processes involve a fair amount of physical work, chemistry knowledge, and high degree of attention to detail. I much prefer the immediacy of positives, as paralleling closely the immediacy of time, and the moment of each exposure made. Having first started to work with collodion in 2013, and daguerreotype in 2015, I find myself rarely shooting to print later. Each one of my images comes into existence within minutes of capture, and each plate will last long after I’m no longer enjoying this sun’s light. The thrill of pulling a perfect plate, especially on location or under other adverse conditions, is unparalleled to anything I’ve experienced.

Late last year, an 8x10 camera came my way, bundled with a few 19th-century lenses. My first experience with large format was in 1999, and since then I’ve probably worked with or owned a good few dozen various makes and models up to 20x24in, but this one excited me more than most have before. New Haven Compact View Camera, made by Rochester Optical Co. who were acquired by Scovill, in the mid-1870s, was the height of the wet collodion era. It’s not too uncommon to find a camera from about that era, but the vast majority I’ve come across were studio models, meant to be housed indoors, upon a stand, with grand respect paid to them daily. Thus studio examples survived in higher numbers, but this one is a field model, made for exploration and adventure. Imagine all the backs of carts and wagons it rode in, or sides of donkeys it was strapped to, and landscapes, structures, and their inhabitants it immortalized. As luck would have it, this camera made its journey through time along with the original plate holder. Each plate holder back then was made alongside the camera, and so unlike say modern 4x5 holders they are not interchangeable, one camera, one holder. They were made of wood, and wet plate bears that name for a reason; the plate has to stay wet through the process, which means silver nitrate, a very corrosive chemical, is bound to be dripping into the holder as one carries it to and from the camera. To combat this, and to save the precious silver, makers of these holders did make little troughs, into which silver was supposed to drip, but of course, that’s just design theory. In reality, there’s a nice reflective stain of silver at the bottom right of the back door on this holder, and the whole inside looks like it’s been worked until it can work no more. As a bonus, an original reducing frame for 5x8 plate size also survived inside. In the corner of the below stereograph from the late 1870s, you can see the exact same camera I am now lucky enough to work with. Brass on that one is still shiny.

Remarkably, the most important parts of the holder, Scovill’s patented molded glass corners upon which the plate rests, 1856 and 1870 patents, were all completely intact, the back door closed perfectly with all hardware present, and the only thing needing replacement was the dark slide. This particular camera was probably put away once two end corners of the wooden slide became so worn out and rounded off that there was no way to prevent light from flooding in through rather sizable gaps. It was likely set aside in sometime in the 1880s, and waited 140+ years to come out and play again. However, 140 years ago, among the latest inventions was rubber, and so the dipping cloth into it to make bellows made perfect sense. It was a lot easier than gluing together leather, perfectly light-tight, and must have looked really slick. Not a lot of accelerated aging testing must have gone on while deciding upon that course of action, because with time that rubber turns hard as a rock, loses its flexibility, and crumbles off in flakes, taking chinks of inner cloth with it. So bellows needed to be replaced too. Other than dark slide and bellows, all I had to do was move the tripod socket from it’s original position on top of the base plate to the bottom of the same hole. I guess screws on tripods back in the day had a much longer reach, around 1in.

Along with the camera came a few lenses, and among them was a small Triple Achromat, made by Dallmeyer of London. This design, intended for shooting landscapes, dates back to the mid-1860s, and is comprised of three groups of cemented lens doublets, and the aperture only opens as wide as f10. These lenses weren’t highly corrected on the edges but provided the flattest field of focus at that time. Because of noticeable edge aberration, they were generally used with much smaller formats than they actually covered, so the 8in example was recommended for 4x5 as a very mild telephoto, while in fact its circle of coverage is very near full 8x10. In the 19th century these lenses were top of the line, so an adventurous outdoor photographer of the mid-70s with demanding taste in lenses, may have shot reduced size plates with this camera and lens combination. In those days, of course, that lens would have been shiny and new, crystal clear, and would have had a focusing pinion to assist with fine focus, because geared focusing on cameras wasn’t a thing yet. Like most lenses of that period, this one too had a slot for aperture plates, simple holes cut in sheets of metal, known as Waterhouse stops. Now this lens was close to 140 years old, and not only was the focus drive missing, which isn’t a big deal, but there was also no flange to connect it to lens board, and nobody was even talking about aperture stops, if one original comes with a lens you buy, consider yourself lucky. The main thing was the balsam, used to glue the doublets in all three groups. In all three pairs it showed heavy signs of separation around the edges, and from first glance one may have thought the lens to be unusable. Once camera and back were ready to go, universal iris flange was installed on the original lens board, so not any lens could be quickly and securely installed there in seconds, and I also quickly fashioned my own Waterhouse dual stop of f16 on one end and f32 on the other. A quick test done on the roof behind my darkroom confirmed that at f32 there was no trace of negative signs from lens separation, and an 8x10 plate was fully covered.

Yosemite National Park should be on everyone’s list of places to visit at least once. Fortunately, I live about 6hr south of it, so that was a natural choice of a place to take the reunited combo for a first field test in over 100 years. I was careful. After all, I would be treading in footsteps of Carlton Watkins, who first shot collodion there in the 1860s. He mainly used a very wide lens called The Globe, which was invented by an American, Charles Harrison, and was the first ultra-wide design, capturing nearly everything in sight, tripod to the moon. Watkins also exclusively shot wet collodion negatives, to be later made into albumen prints, which of course could then be sold in albums and editions. In my case, I wanted to directly translate my experience of being there by producing direct positive images on location, each as unique as my presence there.

Once in Yosemite, there was only one day dedicated to shooting tintypes, as I wanted to leave the second day to make a daguerreotype. One day is not a lot of time at all, considering that you have to move your entire darkroom from place to place if you want to shoot at multiple locations. A ton of packing and unpacking of chemistry and supporting gear is involved, and then there’s the choreographed collodion dance of making every plate, in which no steps are to be rushed if one strives for quality.

To make each tintype positive, one is required to pour salted collodion onto an aluminum plate, wait an appropriate amount of time for it to ‘set’, and dip it in a deliberate manner into a bath of silver nitrate, where, over a period of 2-5min, it becomes sensitive to light. Under red light, the plate is then extracted from the bath, and placed in plate holder to be exposed. After exposure, an iron sulfate developer is used to bring out the latent image. Development is carried out in an open tray or on hand and is judged by both time and visual inspection. Water is used as a stop bath, and then a regular fixer clears unexposed bromides and iodides to reveal the positive image.

Another thing to think about when looking at these images is the spectral sensitivity of collodion. This medium, like the vast majority of all early mediums was blue-sensitive. That’s even worse than monochromatic, which is sensitive to green and creeping into the yellow spectrum. No, collodion is pretty much sensitive to blue and UV wavelengths of light. This means that skies and clouds automatically want to turn blank white, and anything in the far distance, with heavy atmospheric perspective, loses contrast and blows out into white pretty fast as well. Meanwhile, things like green foliage, red or brown ground, the wood of tree trunks, and anything that isn’t remotely blue, registers as black, and so requires a lot more exposure. The vastness of Yosemite valley makes for an unforgettable experience of being there, but it also presents a very challenging lighting and distance situation with the wet plate process. To keep detail in as wide of a tonal and color range as presented by Yosemite, I had to balance my exposure times carefully, using a few tricks I learned along the way.

The distance of the vantage point to be captured to the darkroom is crucial.  It determines how far one has to lug an 8x10 camera and a tripod worthy of supporting it, and then there’s running to the camera and back again with a loaded plate holder to factor. The faster operation is performed the better, so logs had to be cleared on the fly, and cliffs used as slides.

The plate with a large log in the foreground was the last plate of the day. By then, the sun had dipped behind mountains to the west, and the valley was mid dusk for a good half an hour, while Half Dome was still lit up, and glowing pink, with shadow enveloping it quickly from below. As visible light fades, UV becomes depleted even faster. Because it was rather chilly and damp out, I was able to extend exposure to 5 minutes without the plate drying out, and even had time to snap a phone photo of the scene as it appeared mid-exposure.  The range of tones upon that plate surprised even yours truly, so the day ended on a high note, which is always rewarding in itself.

All in all, 9 8x10 tintype plates to my liking were captured that day, gathered from 3 locations, so I considered it a successful journey. To see all 9, plus a 4x5in daguerreotype completed check out this Facebook Album!

When viewed live, nearly infinite detail offered by extreme resolution of collodion, combined with good old 19th-century optics, shows sharply individual branches atop background ridges you see in each plate. The Art of Photography is the only way I have to support my life and passion. Please consider purchasing one of those original plates for your home, or as a gift for someone who will appreciate it.

A lot more work in wet plate and daguerreotype techniques, as well as stories from the road, can be found on my website The Photo Palace! Thanks for stopping by!

Anton

Photo Palace

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out our Film-Focused YouTube Channel!