I work as a Technology Manager in the Entertainment Industry. My first film was Disney's Dinosaur and have been credited on several films since.
I love working on old electronics, especially old radios. I am also passionate about technology and education.
I have 4 kids and you can read about us on our family blog.
We've recently been working on learning wet plate collodion photography. After we ran a few tests at home, it was time to try a test in the field. This meant building a field darkroom and making all our supplies easy to transport.
The Portable Darkroom
I built a folding table years ago for use on camping trips. Rather than start from scratch, I decided to repurpose the old table. I removed the legs and added black felt to the inside. Also cut a hole in one of the sides and added a square piece of glass that I had painted red. This will act as the safelight. The collodion emulsion can not see red, so you can work safely inside with red light.
I also added a shelf and some small drawers.
Here's how everything looked once it was painted and finished. Next step was to add the "tent" portion to make it light proof.
I soldered some copper pipe to make elbows and got oak dowels for the tent poles. I made sure it was large enough that I could stand inside of it.
We then made a tent out of period correct linen to block out the light.
Inside of the tent.
Transporting Supplies
We also wanted a nice way to be able to carry all the chemicals. We thought about using a plastic milk crate or tub, but wanted something more period correct. I was able to get a wood caddy at Micheal's craft store and create wood compartments inside. I then lined it with Felt.
I then added some wood trim to the outside to give it an appearance of period luggage.
Added a nice coat of period correct Shellac (never polyurethane) to give it a little more of a finish.
Here's how the caddy looks with the bottles in it.
We were then ready for the road!! Brandon like's wearing a frock coat and a bowler hat when doing photography.
Fort Tejon Dragoon Days
We headed up to Fort Tejon for their Dragoon Days event. This is a neat event to visit if you've never been there. We set up the Darkroom and the chemicals.
Pouring a plate in the field was especially challenging with wind, bugs, dust, and distractions.
Though, we were able to make an image.
Once we had proof of concept, we started taking photos of people.
Here is Kevin with his portrait after it fully dried.
Scratched this one while processing. :(
Got a nice group photo. This exposure was in the afternoon so the exposure time was 4 Seconds! It's still a little bit light, but came out OK.
Overall, our success rate is about 50%. Clearly we need more practice before we are ready for the major leagues. Though, we felt we had enough success in the field to try in the classroom. Brandon brought the entire setup to school. He's teaching the 8th grade class how to do wet plate so they can run a photo booth at the Annual SCVi 8th grade living history event. / Civil War Reenactment.
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.
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!
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.
I've made this several times for guests and parties at work. I've been asked about the recipe.
2 Medium Onions
2 Tbsp Minced Garlic
1 Can (7oz) chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
2 tsp Oregano
4 tsp salt
1 oz Achiote paste
2 Tbsp Cumin
4 tsp Chili Powder
8 cans black beans
Step 1:
Mince the onions in a food processor. Add the garlic and cook them down together with olive oil till the onion starts to turn translucent.
Step 2:
Mince the chipotle peppers and other spices (Oregano, Chili Powder, Cumin, Achiote Paste) in a food processor. Add them with the salt to the grilled onion mixture. You will make a red colored paste which is the flavoring sauce for the beans.
Step 3:
Add between 6-8 cans of black beans (depending on how spicy you want your chili) to a crock pot. Pour in the spice sauce made in steps 1 and 2. Simmer in the crock pot for a couple hours till the mixture blends well. If you like your chili to be more tangy, you can add up to 1/4 cup of ketchup to the mix. This gives it more BBQ sauce flavor and reduces the hotness of the peppers a bit.
I needed a signal generator for my repair bench and was considering purchasing one. There are many good options under $200 that can be considered. However, my dad had several old ones in his collection that were in unknown condition. I chose this one as a project.
Overall, it's a pretty nice unit with a vernier dial and large display. It also has 400Hz audio output for testing audio circuits. It clearly was going to require some physical cleaning as well as some electrical repair.
The inside is well organized and easy to service.
I was able to find the manual on the Bama site : https://bama.edebris.com/manuals/paco/e200c/ It wasn't an exact match, but seemed reasonably close.
There did not appear to be consistent RF output. I suspected the electrolytic filter capacitor and decided to swap it out. It was an interesting multi-section capacitor with the elements in series.
I created a similar setup with modern capacitors. I used shrink tube to emulate the original color configuration.
I could have left it like this, but I thought it would be nice to keep the original appearance.
I always enjoy the challenge of trying to maintain original appearances on equipment so I hollowed out the original cardboard shell and placed the new capacitors inside.
I tested all the tubes and they all tested new. Some of the dials were flaky so I cleaned them all with electrical cleaner and that brought them all back to life. I then tested it out. My desktop multimeter has a frequency counter so I hooked it up to the Signal Generator. The 130Khz setting (inner circle on dial) shows 130Khz on the meter. Looks good!
Should be a useful tool for future projects. The next step was to work out the leads. This device has an old style Amphenol 75 series microphone connector.
I then ran it through its paces with the cable in play testing from 90-200Khz. I would test more, but my tester only goes up to 200Khz. (200 Kilocycles).
