Long before film rolls and megapixels, photographs were made using metal plates covered in photosensitive chemicals. One of the most iconic and influential of these early photo technologies are tintypes.
A documentary photographer and photo preservationist painstakingly restored thousands of glass plate photographs that reveal what life was like in New England 160 years ago.
Photographer Markus Hofstaetter is back with another unique photography project: he created a high dynamic range (HDR) tintype using a super-fast 120mm f/1.0 lens.
Tintype Photographic Studio, Silver and Cedar, has exploded in popularity over the last three years, largely thanks to an enthralled TikTok audience.
Photography as an art isn't easy, but running a successful photography business is even more challenging. Despite this, Noyel Gallimore managed to build a business focused around the oft-forgotten art of large format and tintype photography.
A collection of early American photography from Larry J. West has been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, transforming the museum’s holdings. West’s collection includes 286 pieces from the 1840s, when daguerreotypes started to show up in the US, to about 1925.
This personal project was born of a lifelong pursuit of charting new paths upon the broad field of the artistic landscape, combined with an unexplained passion for vintage ground glass focusing loupes.
Photographer Markus Hofstaetter has been looking for what he calls his "dream lens" for some time, visiting flea markets and using his contacts to try and locate the Dallmeyer 3B Petzval lens, circa 1876. Thanks to one of his friends, he finally found one in shockingly-good condition.
Photographer Roberto Serrini received an antique camera as a gift from his father: a Rochester Premo B. Curious to see what it was like shooting with this camera as if it was 1893, Serrini decided to give see what that process was like.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
Italian photographer Ursula Ferrara's Lomography Lomo'Instant Wide camera is a bit different than others you'll find. Instead of shooting Instax Wide instant photos, it's used for capturing tiny wet plate collodion photos.
Wet plate photographer Markus Hofstätter wanted to use his art to encourage people to #stayathome during the coronavirus pandemic, so he took a series of self-portraits that are meant to drive home a simple message: don't be like Bob.
Photographer Markus Hofstätter has made a name for himself by pushing wet plate photography to new heights, trying things others have never even thought to do. Today brings yet another example of his creativity, as he sets out to create an animation using, not digital files, but wet plate collodion tintypes.
Now these are some cast portraits we can really get behind. On-set photographer Wilson Webb recently got the chance to photograph the entire cast of Best Picture nominee Little Women, but instead of shooting glitzy studio portraits, he decided to stay historically accurate and capture wet plate collodion portraits instead.
During this year's STORY conference in Nashville, TN, photographer Blake Wylie did something really cool. He turned a massive symphony hall into what might be the world's largest darkroom so that he could capture and develop a tintype portrait on-stage, in front of an audience of 1,400 people.
While I was visiting San Francisco, Kristy Headley, a dear friend and fellow engineer, showed me her studio. There I was lucky enough to sit for her while she did some vintage tintyping. Tintyping was one of the earliest forms of photography, popular in the 1850s.
Before Instagram became a worldwide phenomenon, Hipstamatic was the cool kid on the block that popularized retro photo filters. And while Hipstamatic hasn't achieved nearly the level of popularity as the now-Facebook-owned app, it's still innovating: it has just launched a powerful new camera app called TinType that shoots realistic-looking tintype-style portraits.
Normally I use videos to document my work. This time the video is the main outcome of my work -- I shot an ultra-macro video that shows how the crystals/salts change during the wet plate collodion process.
Big Red is a new 4-minute feature about Steven Glynn, a "a quirky photographer with an old-school style." Glynn shoots tintype photos.
Rob Gibson is a tintype photographer who works in what he calls "the world's fastest darkroom." After photographing vintage motorcycle and car events, he develops his tintypes in a 1938 Harley-Davidson sidecar that he zooms around with.
Once a year for the past 12 years, people descend upon Governor's Island in New York City to experience the sights and sounds of the 1920s through the Jazz Age Lawn Party. And for the past 4 years, the Penumbra Tintype Studio has been on hand shooting tintype portraits of the attendees.
I've been shooting tintypes for almost six years now and love to push the boundaries of what is possible with this slow and difficult photographic process. Taking a tintype from the air was an idea that, years ago, I had shelved as the technology wasn't there yet. Drones were pretty scarce and the ones I had seen were extremely limited in payload and stability. But this spring I decided to revisit the idea.
Given that most photos are captured digitally and shared online, it’s easy to forget the beauty of a print.
Those who have known me long enough are aware of my passion for Rolleiflex cameras. Back before I got deeper and deeper into alternative photography I used to shoot my TLRs all the time.
A while back we shared the world's smallest tintypes, created with a tiny modified camera. Now here's a look at the opposite end of the spectrum: the world's largest tintypes, shot using a colossal room-sized cameras.
Photographer Patrick Demmons shoots tintype portraits for about $60 a pop through his Revival Tintype studio in Oakland, California. In the 2.5-minute profile above by WIRED, Demmons offers a short and sweet look at what tintype photography is and how it's done.
Tested recently put on a show at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. One of the presentations was by local photographer Michael Shindler, who specializes in wet plate collodion photography.
In the 12-minute video above, Shindler transforms the theater into a studio and darkroom, introducing the live audience to this 19th-century photography process by creating a large-format tintype portrait of Adam Savage (the co-host of Mythbusters).
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.
Back in 2010, a man named Randy Guijarro in Fresno, California, found and purchased an old tintype photo for $2 at a junk shop. It turns out that photo is worth up to $5 million because it's only the second authenticated picture that shows the famous outlaw Billy the Kid.
The other night I came across the work of photographer Victoria Will, who made real tintype portraits of some actors who attended this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The portraits themselves were excellent but what really drew me in was the effect of the tintype medium and the old lens and camera that was used to make the images; very narrow depth of field, low tonal range, and non-uniform exposure across the frame. I decided I wanted to see if I could replicate the look of tintype using my Sony A7R and some Photoshop massaging.
Here's a creative (and super meta) idea for a photo project: photographer Sean Hawkey traveled to a silver mine in Peru and shot tintype portraits of the miners there using the silver they mined as his emulsion.
We never get sick of watching talented wet plate photographers at work. This process, made to look so simple by those who have been honing their craft for years, is actually incredibly complex and finicky. And so when the Tested crew decided to get MythBusters' star and fellow host Jamie Hyneman's picture taken, they went to Michael Shindler, one of the absolute best.
When photographer Mark Dawson and his girlfriend photographer Kari Wehrs were challenged to the popular ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, they decided to go old-school. In addition to donating -- that is, after all, the real point of all this -- they set up an old tintype camera and captured the entire thing 1850s style.
I hope you aren’t planning on sleeping anytime soon. Because these photographs from photographer Marcus DeSieno might just give you nightmares. What are they, you ask? Why, they’re nothing more than tintypes of parasites. Completely normal, right?
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.
If you don't really think about it, it's easy to take video for granted. After all, you can pull out your cell phone and be recording video in a few seconds flat (even fewer if you have Pressy). But what if you were limited to older photographic techniques? No, we don't mean film, we mean wet plate photography.
Capturing even a 12fps animation for only a few seconds would seem an enormous task, and yet, that's exactly what director Kellam Clark and his 40-person crew -- altogether The Living Tin -- are doing. They're shooting video made entirely of collodion tintypes.
When husband and wife photography duo Loren Doyen and Adrian Whipp drive around for work, it might look to most people like they're hauling around a tiny mobile home. The trailer is actually their Lumiere Tintype Photobooth, one of the world's first fully mobile tintype portrait studios.
When my wife Sara and I finally decided to start planning our wedding (after a crazy Muppet Proposal proposal that seemed to tickle quite a few people's fancy) one thing that became very important to us was what to do with our wedding portraits/photography.
We are both photographers. Sara and I have experience in handmade processes (Sara is heavily into large format pinhole photography and albumen printing), and after the proposal thing went viral we had all kinds of photographers contacting us pushing their services in our face.
Gigapixel photography is all the rage these days, as photographers all over the world compete to hold the record for "world's largest photo," but one photographer in San Francisco is participating in a very different way.
Michael Shindler, a photographer at the tintype studio Photobooth, has built a custom giant tintype camera that shoots portraits that are the analog equivalent of a gigapixel photo.
Ed Drew is an artist who's studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, pursuing a BFA in sculpture with a minor in photography. He's also a defensive heavy weapons and tactics specialist for the California Air National Guard.
When Drew was deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan this past April as a helicopter aerial gunner, he decided to bring his passion for photography with him. What resulted were the first tintype photos to be created in a combat zone since the Civil War.