collodion

Photographer Matt Alberts used an antiquated wet plate tintype camera to cover the modern world of freeride motocross.

Tintype Photographic Studio, Silver and Cedar, has exploded in popularity over the last three years, largely thanks to an enthralled TikTok audience.

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.

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.

During a photo shoot last summer under the hot sun in the South of France, photographer …

Want a crazy photography challenge? Try photographing a snowflake. Want to make it even more challenging? Try doing it with the wet plate collodion process.

That's what a couple of photography professors over at the Rochester Institute of Technology recently attempted and pulled off.

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.

Love the look of wet plate collodion photographs? Did you know you can give any digital photo that same look using Photoshop? It's a technique that can be learned in about 10 minutes.

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.

Want to see how wet-plate collodion photography is done but have the attention span of a goldfish? Our buddy Sam Cornwell over at Phogotraphy has created an unusual step-by-step wet plate walkthrough -- everything is crammed into a 6-second Vine video.

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'.

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.

"Barbie Blad" by photographer Hamid Blad is a series of portraits that mixes the old and the new. The oldness is contributed by the fact that they are created using the 19th-century collodion process, while the newness is due to the fact that each portrait is of a Barbie doll.

Photographer Justin Borucki has spent the better part of a year and a …

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.

Skateboard company Element recently put together a wonderful little mini-documentary titled The Road to Wolfboro. In it, a dedicated film crew follows photographer Brian Gaberman around as he shares his fascination of wet plate photography and captures some of the most beautiful scenes across the east cost.

From portraits to surreal scenes that feel as if they were pulled out of some long-lost storybook, the wet plate collodion photography of Alex Timmermans is unlike any we've seen or featured before.

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.

Keliy Anderson-Staley is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Houston. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, the California Museum of Photography and the Portland Museum of Art, and is currently on view at the Houston Center for Photography.

Her book of portraits, On a Wet Bough, is forthcoming from Waltz Books. She is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Two years after photographer Ian Ruhter tried to capture photographs of the Yosemite Valley using the world’s largest wet plate collodion camera and suffered a "devastating failure," he decided to chase this seemingly impossible dream again.

If you don't really think about it, it's easy to take video for granted. After all, you can pull out your cell phone and be recording video in a few seconds flat (even fewer if you have Pressy). But what if you were limited to older photographic techniques? No, we don't mean film, we mean wet plate photography.

Capturing even a 12fps animation for only a few seconds would seem an enormous task, and yet, that's exactly what director Kellam Clark and his 40-person crew -- altogether The Living Tin -- are doing. They're shooting video made entirely of collodion tintypes.

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.

Photographer David Emitt Adams experiments with unique metal bases in his experiments with tintype photography. Last week we shared a project in which he used abandoned tin cans found in a desert to create tintype photographs.

36 Exposures is another project of his that uses unconventional materials for creating old school photos. It's a series of tintype photographs that were created using 35mm film canisters.

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.

Here's a video that may be very interesting to you if you've never tried your hand at creating a tintype with wet plate collodion photography. Oklahoma City-based photographer Mark Zimmerman recently strapped a GoPro Hero 3 to his head and went through the entire process of creating a wet-plate photo on aluminum, from flowing the collodion in the beginning, through exposing it using his large format camera, and ending with a finished tintype photo of a camera.

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.

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

iPhone users who want to flaunt their inner photography geek can buy special skins or cases that transform their phone into a camera look-alike. That option wasn't awesome enough for photographer Jake Potts of Bruton Stroube Studios, who recently decided to use his phone's glass back to create an ambrotype photo using the wet plate collodion process!

While there are quite a few photographers out there who are fans of using early photographic processes (e.g. the …