Portraits made with the wet collodion process. The images are made directly in the camera on glass (ambrotypes) or blackened metal plates (tintypes). I use a variety of cameras, ranging from a relatively modern 5″x4″ MPP technical camera to an 1880’s wooden whole plate camera. The lenses also vary; often a 180mm Zeiss Jena lens on the MPP, and a brass Petzval lens on the larger camera.
A few still life images made with the wet collodion process. I find that wet collodion is a really good process for still life; as well as being well-suited to working in a home studio, it renders texture really nicely and the irregular borders add interest.
Wet collodion is a Victorian photographic process, first suggested by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. Collodion (gun cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol) is salted with cadmium bromide and flowed onto a glass or a blackened metal plate. When the collodion has set, the plate is sensitised in a bath of silver nitrate, placed in the plate holder of a view camera and exposed while still wet. After brief development in an iron-based developer and fixing (traditionally in potassium cyanide, although modern ammonium thiosulphate fixers do the job) the plate is washed, dried and varnished. If the image is made on glass, the reverse is painted black to give a positive image. ...
Two of the robots pictured here were created by researchers at the University of Sheffield. AnTon, made by Dr. Robin Hofe, is an animatronic speaking robot that is used to study the mechanisms of speech production. eMo, made by Prof. Noel Sharkey, is capable of sensing its environment and displaying emotions. The images are clear glass ambrotypes, made by the wet collodion process.
One of the characteristics of early photographic processes is that they are slow. This limits their use for indoor portraiture unless a strong artificial light source is available, or a camera with a very fast lens. Regarding the latter, I came across an interesting camera design that gives a fast working aperture of f/1.7 by using a concave focusing mirror rather than a conventional lens. This camera, invented by Alexander Wolcott and John Johnson, was awarded the first U.S. photographic patent in May 1840, patent number 1582. ...