Search Results for: tintype

Markus Hofstaetter scratched lenses

Should You Buy a Scratched Lens?

It seems like a scratched lens would produce poor images, but as Markus Hofstaetter shows, it can be hard to tell when looking at the photos themselves. Scratched lenses are typically relatively cheap to purchase second-hand, and they can represent a fantastic bargain.

AI Imagery May Destroy History As We Know It

Artificial intelligence images have the potential to misinform the future. For the first time in the technological present, we are on the cusp of a life-and-art-altering explosion of intentionally created dis-informational imagery.

The Three Eras of Photography: Plate, Film, and Digital

After being invented in the early 1800s, photography and cameras have gone through three major eras: the plate era, the film era, and the current digital era. This article is a brief history of photography through the lens of these eras.

Smithsonian Buys Rare Photos From First African American Studios

A collection of early American photography from Larry J. West has been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, transforming the museum’s holdings. West’s collection includes 286 pieces from the 1840s, when daguerreotypes started to show up in the US, to about 1925.

A Brief History of Ground Glass Focusing Loupes

This article is dedicated to a very helpful yet often-overlooked photographic accessory. After scouring the Web, I have only been able to find few brief entries dedicated to those devices, so I hope my writing will be found helpful by inquisitive minds interested in the history of photo equipment.

Morsiple Messages: A Daguerreotype Multiple Exposure Method

In early spring 1839, Paris was abuzz with excitement in connection with a recently published letter, in which the invention of photography was confirmed by reliable sources. The world was now waiting for the French government to work out a deal with its inventor Louis J.M. Daguerre for details of the daguerreotype process to become public. 

Daguerrean Dream: A Visual Symphony in 43 Daguerreotype Plates

Having now finalized work on this series, I will attempt to put into words its impetus, as well as how it came to fruition. This will be a lengthy entry, proportional in size to the monumentally significant nature of this work for me, and therefore I shall start from the beginning, as all things have their origins.

Shooting Daguerreotypes of California Redwoods

This trip has been waiting in the wings ever since I made my first successful daguerreotype in the redwoods two years ago. I actually planned on going as early as August this year, but one project after another kept getting in the way, and for months I kept pushing it back by a couple of weeks.

Petroglyph Daguerreotypes on Daguerre’s Birthday

Toward the end of November, I went back to one of my favorite places in the desert. A spot out in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest significant human population well over an hour drive away.

Wet Plate Collodion Portraits of Frontline Medical Workers

It hasn’t been easy being a portrait photographer during a pandemic. I opened my tintype portrait studio in February of 2020 with visions of goofy vintage photo remakes and smiling families gracing my lens. By the end of March, it was only still lifes full of skulls and dead flowers, dark and stale tones oddly appropriate for the time.

In Our Time: A Year of Shooting Exactly One Film Photo Per Day

At the end of every year, I get to see, for the first time, all the things I’ve already seen. New Year’s Eve is my final film pickup day for One Second, an ongoing project in which I, an otherwise sane, rational, working modern photographer, make one photograph, and only one photograph, on film, every day, with no do-overs and no second chances.

These Daguerreotypes Were Made by Painting Light Onto Body Parts

Chimacabres come out at night. They are around during the day too of course, but the night is when they really thrive. In the dark, it’s harder to tell if you’re face to face with a fellow person or if it’s a chimacabre in front of you, and they don’t even have faces.

Photographer Turns Symphony Hall into the World’s Largest Darkroom

During this year's STORY conference in Nashville, TN, photographer Blake Wylie did something really cool. He turned a massive symphony hall into what might be the world's largest darkroom so that he could capture and develop a tintype portrait on-stage, in front of an audience of 1,400 people.

Light Formulation: Statement of an Artist

I always resisted writing artist statements and bios. In school, that part of every assignment or exhibition was the most agonizing. It felt overly simplistic to just describe what the viewer was about to encounter, or why objects or abstract shapes, making my specific image or groups of images, were presented in this way or another.

A Multi-Plate, Multi-Lens Daguerreotype Panorama

I’ve been experimenting non-stop with a few new daguerreotype techniques lately, and however promising the results are looking so far, those experiments are slow going. But here’s something I thought up and was able to execute in a relatively speedy manner -- something I believe warrants a look. I don’t believe this method of making a panoramic image has ever been utilized before, so I’m dubbing it the "Antorama."

Ice Crystals Captured in a Wet Plate Portrait

New York photographer Justin Borucki has been documenting his city with a pop-up tintype studio out of the back of his car. While shooting a portrait for a client recently, Borucki unexpectedly captured a beautiful leaf-like pattern across the photo due to the frigid wind chill causing ice crystals to form.

Why the Film Lab of the Future is Open Source

We are approaching the peak capacity for film photography labs. The machines are old, the parts are scarce, the demand is high. The measly Kodak Pakon Scanner, terrible it may be, fetches absurdly high prices.