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.
Photographer Roberto Serrini received an antique camera as a gift from his father: a Rochester Premo B. Curious to see what it was like shooting with this camera as if it was 1893, Serrini decided to give see what that process was like.
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.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
Film photography has enjoyed a significant resurgence in the last several years despite the expansive growth of digital cameras. In this 11-minute short documentary, Exploredinary interviews a few analog photographers to see why they stick with the aged format.
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.
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.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
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.
Italian photographer Ursula Ferrara's Lomography Lomo'Instant Wide camera is a bit different than others you'll find. Instead of shooting Instax Wide instant photos, it's used for capturing tiny wet plate collodion photos.
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.
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.
On October 1st, inventor of the smartphone photo filter Hipstamatic made its grand return to the spotlight by releasing Hipstamatic X: a free iOS camera app that hopes to "bring all the joy, quirk, and randomness of film photography to your pocket."
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.
I've been involved with The Wild West Days in Viroqua, Wisconsin since 2008. I've been doing photography for most of that time as well, but as-of 2017, officially as Hickok Country Photography.
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.
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."
Modern Collodion has just announced the winners of the 2019 Wet Plate Competition, the second annual contest for wet plate collodion photographers around the world after launching last year.
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.
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.
How much has camera image quality improved over the past decade and a half? Photographer Jeff Rey recently decided to see by doing a simple test with his Nikon D200 crop sensor CCD DSLR, a camera that was originally announced back in 2005 with a price tag of $1,700 (over $2,200 in today's dollars).
If you’re like me and you’ve tried to attach gels to your lights in the past, you’ve likely resorted to using one of the many types of sticky tapes available. When I used to manage a studio, I would see all manner of tapes being used to attach gels to hot modifiers.
Normally I use videos to document my work. This time the video is the main outcome of my work -- I shot an ultra-macro video that shows how the crystals/salts change during the wet plate collodion process.
Yongnuo has announced the new YN 50mm f/1.4N E lens for Nikon F-mount cameras. The lens comes three months after the Canon equivalent was unveiled.
Nikon has filed a trademark application in the European Union for the word "Noct." With the company's full-frame mirrorless camera around the corner, it seems likely this new trademark filing may be related to the new camera system.
In the era of the “selfie”, of the relentless click-and-publish images on social media, of the mega sensors replete with megapixels, we are witnessing an unpredictable resurgence of many ancient photographic devices and techniques.
This year, the wet plate supply brand Modern Collodion ran its first annual Wet Plate Competition. The 2018 contest received over 200 submissions from 75 wet plate photographers based in 19 countries. The grand prize winner is the photo above, titled "Aristolochia Pods," by Paul Barden.
How's this for a lucky photo find: a 19th-century tintype photo purchased from eBay for just $10 has been identified as an extremely rare portrait of the infamous outlaw Jesse James... worth an estimated $2 million+.
Adrian Cook is a wet plate collodion photographer based in Sydney, Australia. The Guardian made this 7-minute video in which Cook talks about his background and walks through the wet plate collodion process by shooting a photo of Sydney Harbor.
A few days ago, for the first time ever in my experience with wet plate photography, I mixed up collodion from scratch. I thought I'd share about the experience.