Search Results for: "wet plate collodion"

Given that most photos are captured digitally and shared online, it’s easy to forget the beauty of a print.

A photography professor in Oklahoma recently had an awesome idea for teaching his students about the beginnings of photography: he turned his classroom into a giant camera obscura.

The Capitol was still under construction on March 4th, 1857, when photographer John Wood set up his wet plate collodion camera and captured the first known photograph of a US Presidential inauguration.

When photographer Erik Hijweege realized that there were over 22,000 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, he was shocked... and inspired. Inspired to create a hauntingly beautiful series of glass ambrotypes depicting some of these endangered species encased in ice.

I know this topic is covered here and there and everywhere: in school and online, in workshops and lectures, on street corner posters and graffiti under freeway overpasses… However, one way or another this topic seems to either elude a lot of photographers entirely or perhaps they ignore it knowingly. Either way, after continually seeing tight headshots done with lenses possessing an obviously incorrect focal length, my personal OCD has reached a boiling point and I decided to finally do this little post complete with a demonstration.

Tested recently put on a show at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. One of the presentations was by local photographer Michael Shindler, who specializes in wet plate collodion photography.

In the 12-minute video above, Shindler transforms the theater into a studio and darkroom, introducing the live audience to this 19th-century photography process by creating a large-format tintype portrait of Adam Savage (the co-host of Mythbusters).

How small can you go when it comes to wet plate collodion photography? Photographer Anton Orlov of The Photo Palace recently experimented with this question by shooting thumbnail-sized 8x11mm tintypes using an old Minox subminiature camera -- a model A III from the 1950s.

Last week, RIT photography professor Willie Osterman held the 2015 RIT Photo MFA picnic in the front yard of his home in Bristol, New York. To commemorate the gathering, he pulled out a giant camera to shoot a wet plate collodion ambrotype portrait of the group.

On the other side of the camera, in the group, was fellow photo professor Frank Cost with a DJI Inspire camera drone. Cost used the drone to capture the wet plate shooting process from a subject's point of view before lifting off into the sky for a bird's-eye view. The drone was also captured in the resulting wet plate from the last portrait attempt.

Photographer Anton Orlov has created what he believes is the world's first camera that's both completely transparent and fully functional. It's called CLERA, short for Clear Camera, and is a camera that you can also look into while a projected photo is being exposed.

Having failed woodworking at school, probably the worst thing I could have done is venture into the world of wet plate photography.

Back in 2012, I learned the dark art of the silver stuff, just around the time the wave of interest was starting to build worldwide. However, as I live in New Zealand, an island nation, it has taken a while (and is still taking a while) to reach us. As a result, getting anything wet plate-related is quite a task. One does not simply walk into a store and buy a 'wet plate kit'.

I wish I hadn’t, but the other day I stumbled across an essay on PetaPixel entitled 12 Reasons  Photographers Still Choose to Shoot Film over Digital. Bravely, the writer had polled his associates who shoot film and culled their responses down to a dandy dozen. I shook my head sadly, because I’d heard them all many times before.

But the worst part came next. I scrolled down to the comments section. I tried mightily to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t, and the lurid spectacle of grown men and women (but mostly men) verbally beating the living daylights out of each other while thousands cheered them on from the cheap seats proved too much for me.

Starting back in May of 2014, I finally put my first foot forward in the making of a 16x20 inch bellows camera. The idea to build a camera was nothing new to me, but I was always hesitant to begin construction since I am the type of person that prefers to work off a set of blue prints and directions. Unfortunately, since my drawing skills aren't amazing, it was pretty difficult to visualize and plan a solid blueprint of the project - which ultimately forced me to bite the bullet and simply begin construction of the camera and problem solve along the way.

Here's a creative (and super meta) idea for a photo project: photographer Sean Hawkey traveled to a silver mine in Peru and shot tintype portraits of the miners there using the silver they mined as his emulsion.

Dylan Burr is a full-time artist from Denver, Colorado, but despite his busy schedule and full-time job, Burr recently embarked on a personal photography project on the side. The project, however, wasn't for him. His goal was to use the raw power of wet plate collodion portraiture to give a name and story to the Denver Area homeless.

What's a photographer to do when they're in possession of a 130-year-old wooden camera and a 100-year-old lens, capable of capturing images using the wet plate collodion process?

Well, if you’re Jonathan Keys, you set out on a mission to document the modern world around you using tools that are all but ancient in the world of photography... and you get spectacular results for your effort.

From Los Angeles based photographer Jamie Johnson comes a unique series of photographs that juxtapose the past and the present in a fascinating way: large format wet plate collodion photos of children writing cheeky modern-day bad deeds on a turn-of-the-century chalkboard.

Artist Emma Howell's landscape images are unlike any we've ever run across. Not because she's capturing something unique, or using a process we've not seen before. They are unique because her images, captured using the wet plate collodion method, are exposed directly onto handblown glass vessels she creates herself.

Deb Schwedhelm is a wife, mother, former nurse in the US Air Force and professional photographer who specializes in shooting underwater. Her photographs have been exhibited widely and featured in numerous publications throughout the world. Visit her website here.

PetaPixel: First off, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. You were a nurse in the Air Force before becoming a photographer, right?

Deb Schwedhelm: I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. After two years of nursing school, I decided to enlist in the Army Reserves. After boot camp and Advanced Individual Training (to become a Unit Supply Specialist), I returned to college and finished my Bachelors in Nursing. I then decided to become an Active Duty Registered Nurse, which I continued to do for 10 years. In 2003, I separated from the military in order to pursue a cochlear implant for my hearing-impaired daughter. In 2006, I purchases a DSLR and begin teaching myself photography -- a longtime dream of mine (more on that below).

There's an awesome little subreddit that has been getting a lot of press coverage as of late. It's called ColorizedHistory, and is a 20,000+ person strong community of "Amateur Historians" who are interested in the idea of creating high quality colorized versions of historical black-and-white photographs.

Wet plate photographer Rob Gibson believes that there are those among us who are "flame-keepers of the past," and if such people exist, he is certainly one of them. Like the others out there who continue to practice age-old photographic techniques such as the daguerreotype or wet collodion process, his passion harkens back to a simpler time -- a time he does his best to recreate with 100% accuracy through his lens.

When my wife Sara and I finally decided to start planning our wedding (after a crazy Muppet Proposal proposal that seemed to tickle quite a few people's fancy) one thing that became very important to us was what to do with our wedding portraits/photography.

We are both photographers. Sara and I have experience in handmade processes (Sara is heavily into large format pinhole photography and albumen printing), and after the proposal thing went viral we had all kinds of photographers contacting us pushing their services in our face.

The Mask Series is a collaboration between wet plate photographers around the world who are trying to raise public awareness of the historical photographic process that they're so passionate about. The whole thing is centered around a specific prop: a vintage Czech M10 gas mask. Basically, every photograph contributed to the project must somehow incorporate one of these gas masks in one way or another.

Photographer and photography student Eric Omori has an interesting project that combines the modern with the historical. He has been capturing paintball wars using wet plate photography. The project is titled Weekend Warriors.

We've shared some interesting digital to analog conversions here in the past (e.g. printing iPhone photos using an enlarger), and here's another one: create a digital wet plate by shooting a photo displayed on your computer monitor.

Slovenia-based professional photographer Borut Peterlin was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of painter/illustrator/author Milan Erič for influential Slovenian magazine Mladina. Peterlin decided that he wanted to create a wet plate collodion photo, but spent weeks worrying about whether he would be able to accomplish it given the tight schedule of the on-location shoot.

Have an old Polaroid camera lying around collecting dust? Did you know that you can use it for wet …