Just a random Saturday night in Wisconsin – with tintype portraits of fire artists! Cloud Nine Fire Show is a Wisconsin based troupe of talented performers specializing in the art of flow. We’ve worked together earlier this Summer to capture the art of flow in the historic tintype process – see our first plates at Cloud Nine Tintypes. Unfortunately, your humble alchemist was unable to to capture the fire in the plates.

So like the Alchemists of old, when confronted with failure it is back to the lab and the library in the sub basement for research. The findings were that fire and alchemy are best friends and silver can be created with fire. The error was that the primordial fire of the sun is much more effective at creating silver than the ceremonial torches of our troupe.

To balance the fire and the sun we waited until the sun was low on the horizon – an hour before sunset. Reduced sunlight and constant fire and Voila we produced silver in our images!

But like all things in life compromises are necessary.. but reducing the sunlight we also had to increase the exposure time. Our first outing used 3-4 seconds. This time we had to use 20 to 40 seconds of exposure. It is really hard to stand still for 20 seconds; it is amazingly hard to stand still for 20 seconds while holding a flaming flow prop!

Now that we’ve produced silver from fire who knows the creative heights we will reach! Learn more about flow and fire artistry at Cloud Nine Fire Show or follow them on Facebook – Cloud Nine

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Learn more about Wet Plate Collodion and the Tintype Process