When photographer Mark Dawson and his girlfriend photographer Kari Wehrs were challenged to the popular ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, they decided to go old-school. In addition to donating -- that is, after all, the real point of all this -- they set up an old tintype camera and captured the entire thing 1850s style.
I hope you aren’t planning on sleeping anytime soon. Because these photographs from photographer Marcus DeSieno might just give you nightmares. What are they, you ask? Why, they’re nothing more than tintypes of parasites. Completely normal, right?
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.
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.
When husband and wife photography duo Loren Doyen and Adrian Whipp drive around for work, it might look to most people like they're hauling around a tiny mobile home. The trailer is actually their Lumiere Tintype Photobooth, one of the world's first fully mobile tintype portrait studios.
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.
Gigapixel photography is all the rage these days, as photographers all over the world compete to hold the record for "world's largest photo," but one photographer in San Francisco is participating in a very different way.
Michael Shindler, a photographer at the tintype studio Photobooth, has built a custom giant tintype camera that shoots portraits that are the analog equivalent of a gigapixel photo.
Ed Drew is an artist who's studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, pursuing a BFA in sculpture with a minor in photography. He's also a defensive heavy weapons and tactics specialist for the California Air National Guard.
When Drew was deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan this past April as a helicopter aerial gunner, he decided to bring his passion for photography with him. What resulted were the first tintype photos to be created in a combat zone since the Civil War.
A few days ago, we told you about an app called Koloid that allowed iOS users to capture some of the look and feel of wet collodion photography using their iPhone. The $1 app let you not only take photos, but 'develop' them as well by tilting your phone to run chemicals over them.
The new app Tintype doesn't go quite that far, but when it comes to authenticity, creator Michael Newton has made sure that his app brought the most accurate looking tintype processing possible to the iOS world.
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.
Using discarded tin cans found on the hot Arizona desert ground, David Emitt Adams has created timeless pieces he calls Conversations with History. The cans are branded with tintype pictures, reflecting ties to the very locations the cans -- some of which have been sitting out in the sun for over forty years -- were found.
In the words of Adams, "The deserts of the West also have special significance in the history of photography. I have explored this landscape with an awareness of the photographers who have come before me, and this awareness has led me to pay close attention to the traces left behind by others."
Warfare is often reduced to headlines in the news and numbers on a page, but it's important to remember that there's a human side to it. The soldiers fighting are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters of people back at home. This is the truth photographer Melissa Cacciola wants to remind the world though her project "War and Peace."
The series consists of 48 tintype photographs of 24 active duty military personnel and veterans. Each subject is photographed both in uniform and in civilian attire.
Getting an authentic tintype of yourself or one of your photos isn't easy. Unless you live near Photobooth in San Francisco or know how to make one yourself, your options are extremely limited. There's a new option available, however, and this one will let you order a tintype from the comfort of your couch.
Restoration company Digital Tintypes recently announced a new website by the same name that will take any photo you give them and turn it into an 8" x 10", 5" x 7", 2.5" x 2.5", or 1" x 1" pendant tintype using the original processing techniques.
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.
The idea behind stop-motion videos is pretty simple: snap a lot of photographs in rapid succession and then string together all the images afterward to animate them. There was a time when the dominant photographic processes weren't fast enough to create any meaningful kind of animation. Does that mean we'll never see a stop-motion animation created using tintypes? Nope. The video above is one example of a stop-motion video created with a super old photographic process: the dry plate tintype.
Documentary filmmaker and photography enthusiast Matt Morris recently noticed a magazine article about a tintype photographer named Harry Taylor based in his hometown of Wilmington, NC. Having recently gotten engaged, Morris and his fiancée decided to have Taylor shoot their engagement photos using the 150-year-old photo process. They ended up sitting for a 5-hour-portrait session, and Morris was stunned by the results.
A few months later, he decided to return to Taylors studio with two Canon 5Ds in tow and spent an afternoon documenting Harry's work. The fantastic 4-minute documentary above is what resulted.
Niniane Kelley of PhotoboothSF -- the SF photo shop that still shoots tintype portraits -- shot a series of tiny tintype photographs using a 110 camera. The images are likely the world's first 110 tintypes, and the world's smallest tintypes as well (each one is about half the size of a standard 35mm frame).
Back in the days before every photo was tagged and shared with family, friends and strangers alike, a photograph was a rare, prized possession. In the Civil War era it wasn't uncommon for soldiers to carry a small tintype of a family member into battle, and if they died, sadly so did all of the information about that photo. That's why the Museum of the Confederacy needs your help.
Here’s another video featuring SF photo shop Photobooth and its tintype …
If film is dying, then tintype photography has been extinct for years, but there’s still …
Last week we shared an interesting video that shows how Civil War-era tintype photographs were created.
Ever wonder how photographs were made back in the days of the Civil War? This video by the George …
Did you know that in vintage tintype photographs of infants mothers were often present in the photo but hidden by a veil? Subjects needed to remain still due to the longer exposure times required back then, so mothers were often asked to hold their children tightly while the portraits were being exposed. It was common practice back then, but the resulting photos are pretty eerie when you look at them now.
Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote …
There’s a new entry in the list of most expensive photographs, and this …