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 …