January Tintype Portrait Session

Rachel (@racheljulianxo) and I met in Neenah for a January tintype portrait session. January is not usually the best time to capture outdoor tintypes. I don’t know that very many people enjoy standing outside in the cold and holding still for a wet plate collodion portrait. I think shivering will definitely blur your portrait. The cold is hard on collodion chemicals too. Everything slows down, light sensitivity drops and development takes longer. Below freezing the collodion will freeze and not work at all.

Winter Tintype portrait of a woman model in a jacket

But after a very cold two weeks the Wisconsin weather shifted to warm (at least not so cold). High 30’s and 40’s are a bit chilly but not too daunting. So we fired up the mobile darkroom and set up some outdoor January tintype portrait sessions. Rachel and I met in Neenah for our portrait session which was part art project and part experiment (cold weather wet plate collodion).

Here is our first tintype of the day. Certainly not my best work but not that bad. However, after fixing strange lines appeared across the image. I have not seen this in my short career as an alchemist! So back to the darkroom for another try!

Plate number 2 was even worst! I did adjust the exposure time and underneath all the “crud” was a pretty good image. But the lines and spots! I was starting to think it was insanity to attempt outdoor January tintype portraits! The last time I saw something that ugly was after too much sun and too many oysters at the Crab Shack on Tybee Island!

tintype of a model in Winter with bad collodion

When you are running an experiment you have to make changes until you find the solution. So I switched to some older collodion I had with. Just a 100ml or so at the bottom of the bottle. Just like that the plate was clear and beautiful! Bad collodion, the story of my life!

washing a tintype of a woman in a warm coat

With time running short, and not a lot of collodion in my “good” bottle, we managed to get one more plate. This was the most beautiful plate of the day by far! The photo here does not really capture the beauty of the image in person.