Learning Wet Plate Photography - Tintypes

Last year, we built a Telegraph for SCVi's Living History day.  This was a project with my daughter Emily and she did an amazing job learning morse code and working with her fellow 8th graders demonstrating 19th century communications.  For this year, it's Brandon's turn in 8th grade and he decided to take on an even more ambitious project - Wet Plate Photography!

Wet Plate Photography is one of the earliest photographic processes used from the 1850's to the 1880's. It involves making your film, chemicals, and sometimes even your camera from scratch.

Planning

This project required a lot of specialized supplies and pretty high learning curve.  I picked up Quinn Jacobson's book : Chemical Pictures The Wet Plate Collodion Book: Making Ambrotypes, Tintypes & Alumitypes to get started.  It was a great resource!

Obtaining Supplies

Chemicals

For the first pass, we sourced chemicals from multiple locations. Since we were doing this with an 8th grade class, we had to avoid the traditional Cyanide and Cadmium based chemicals.  This meant using Sodium Thiosulfate for the Fixer and using a non-cadmium collodion.

Here is a comprehensive list of everything we had to purchase. Although these are just starter quantities, it gives an idea of what you'll need to purchase to make your first few tintypes.   I have to give a call out to Bostick and Sullivan.  What a great resource! 

Step	Items Purchased	Cost
Step 1 : Pouring The Plate	Bostick & Sullivan Cadmium Free Collodion	86.89
	Modern Collodion Tintype Plates	14.99
	Ethyl Ether (For restoring collodion)	38.65
Step 2: Sensitizing The Plate	UPI Metals Silver Nitrate 100g	85.61
	Distilled Water From Grocery Store	1
Step 3: Development	95% Ethanol Alchohol	35.35
	Ferrous Sulfate 500g	12.62
	Glacial Acetic Acid 1000ml	18.79
	Distilled Water From Grocery Store
Step 4: Fixing	Sodium Thiosulfate 500g	7.04
Step 5: Varnish	Sandarac Varnish 250ml	28.35
Total Cost		329.29

If you prefer Amazon, some of these supplies are available there as well for similar prices:

Camera

For the camera, I decided to use our Graflex 4x5 sheet film camera with a Fim Pack adapter.  I had a few of them so it was an easy place to start.

The film pack adapter is not a perfect fit, but was fine for getting started.  We used Balsa Wood to add a little meat to the sides to make the fit a bit tighter.

Preparing The Chemicals

We decided to use 19th century Apothecary bottles to give an authentic appearance to our supplies.   Since we have a darkroom setup at the house, we used regular 5x7 photo trays for the chemicals. 

We used the recipes from Quinn's book to mix chemicals in the right quantities and proportions. 

Our First Tintype

Pouring The Plate

This is the first step of creating a tintype is to pour the collodion on to the plate.  This is arguably the most important, and also the most challenging part of the process.  Although I read instructions on this multiple times, it helped much more to have an example.  Fortunately, Quinn Jacobs has a nice  YouTube video showing how to do this.

Silver Bath

Second step is to dip the plate in Silver Nitrate bath for 3 minutes.  The silver nitrate reacts with the salts in the collodion to make light sensitive silver bromide.  Since the plate becomes light sensitive in this step, it has to be done in the darkroom.

Exposure

The light sensitive plate is loaded into the film holder.  We then have a few minutes to get it to the camera and expose the photo.  Since the film holder is light tight, it can leave the darkroom with the tintype inside of it.

Development

The film holder is brought back to the darkroom and developed in the developer for about half a minute.

Fixer

The tintype is moved to the fixer and this clears the plate so you can see it.  Once fixing is done, the plate is no longer light sensitive.

Results

Our first results fell pretty short of satisfactory.  Instead of the images we intended to photograph, we came out with muddy, cloudy images.  Although it was good to at least see were were getting some imagery, we weren't getting anything close to what we expected.

We theorized that we were both over-developing, and under-exposing.  We decided to do a simple print with just a simple object. 

This worked!  Although there were some pretty severe shortcomings in my ability to pour the plate. You can see that we have some density variation in the negative.  Maybe the way we are pouring it?  Also, there's some color in the dark part of the image.  Still more to learn, but we had basic proof of concept.  For the next phase, we set the camera up outside.  

We did exposures at F4 for 10, 5, 4, and 3 seconds.   These were not so lovely. However, we did have some things in there that looked like branches and vines.  I think we heavily overexposed. 

Looking closely in the sun, you can see some grape leaves and vines.  

Progress!!  Though we still have quite a way to go. We iterated on our process quite a bit, practicing our pouring, trying different exposures, being careful about development time, and finally started to get some decent results.  Here is the grape vine with a 2 second exposure at F4 with about 30 seconds in the developer.

With more practice, we were able to try photos of people.  Here's one of Brandon.  It was SO exciting to finally have something that looked like a photograph!

We took a couple more.  Here's Brandon and I after the plates dried.

We still have a few things to figure out...

• Why do we have a gray haze on the plates coming out of the fixer? It washes off, but requires a wiping off with a thumb.  Is that normal? 
• How long should we rinse? Should we use Hypo Clearing Agent? 
• There's black specs in the photo.  Are those an impurity somewhere?  How do we get rid of them? 

We'll keep practicing and trying things.  Hope to have better images soon.  There's also a few classes I might consider taking to get some pro tips such as this one at Los Angeles Center of Photography.

Continue Reading : Up Next -> Attempting Wet Plate In The Field.