When life gives you thistles - why make a collodion wet plate? I made a series of 5x7" tintypes and Ambrotypes (images on glass) yesterday and am so pleased with how the images turned out! I harvested a variety of plants in the morning for still life images but stuck with the thistles all day. Sometimes you get in the "zone" and time fades away and things just flow. Before I knew it dinner time was approaching. So I shut down image capture and set up varnishing my day's production. Like all my plates, this set was preserved with traditional…

Fall is cattail season! Here is a wet plate collodion still life of some cattails I found by my home. This plate was more for practice than for "keeping". I am learning how to manage colder temperatures. The cold has an impact on the chemicals used for wet plate. Mainly everything takes longer. Longer exposure (more light) and longer development times. One of the appealing parts of this process is the randomness. You never can be sure how things will turn out until you actually shoot a plate. That makes it surprising and gives a satisfaction to the finished product.…

Part of the fun with wet plate collodion is experimentation. Here is a plate of collodion orchids on stained glass. There is a lot of challenges to shooting on stained glass. But the final image is so beautiful! The first challenge is getting the exposure correct - just a matter of trial and error (which takes a lot of time). Next is developing the plate. Development is most challenging because the glass makes the image look less intense than on clear glass. The development process is done under red "safe" light and the blue glass looks strange. This plate could…

Here is a 6x6" tintype wet plate image of peonies. This photograph captures so many things that are the essence of a traditional photographic processes. These trademarks include: Narrow Depth of Focus: Antique lenses were designed to gather as much light as possible. Traditional photography methods are less sensitive to light than modern sensors so you needed a lot of light to create images. The consequence of high light gathering power is much less of the image is in focus (narrow focus). Our eyes operate in a similar way and our eyes see the world with only parts in focus.Long…