One of the joys of being a roving Alchemist is all the interesting people you meet! I started working with Cloud Nine Fire Show this year and are working on a set of wet plate images of all the artists in the group. Could Nine performs all around Wisconsin and is based in the Fox Valley area. These 5×7 inch tintypes were made at a practice session to test out how fire captures on tintypes.
Madeline and Tia use fire hoops in this first image. “Wait” you say, “where is the fire?” Well, the hoops had a lot of fire but it didn’t show up in the 5 second exposure..
So we tried again with a lot more fire – and a couple of extra seconds of exposure. These two plates with Tina Neena had lots of fire on her prop but no fire in the picture! You can see some distortion from the flames but not the flames them selves…
So where did the fire go? Wet plate collodion is sensitive to light in the blue area of the spectrum. So if you photograph anything blue it will come out very bright or even white. Reds come out dark because red light is not very active. Yellow is the worse color for wet plate because it is almost invisible. The inside of my portable darkroom is yellow for that reason – the yellow is black to wet plate.
Fire artists use white gas for their torches and white gas burns yellow! Beautiful in the show but not so good for tintypes. So before my next adventure with Cloud Nine I will be experimenting with alternate fuels to see if they show in the pictures. I have high hopes for alcohol!
Our final plate is Madeline with a beautiful crown of invisible fire!
I will be doing more tintypes with the Cloud Nine performing artists in the future. Meanwhile, here are some of the other work I have done with members of the team: