I use the Victoria-era wet plate collodion technique to create heirloom portraits on thin sheets of metal known as tintypes. Using chemistry I mix myself, I turn a metal plate into a custom piece of film. It is loaded into a 100-year-old camera and an exposure is made. The plate must be developed before it can dry, hence the ‘wet’ in wet plate. After development the milky blue negative ethereally inverses in the fixer bath to reveal the final image. Finally, it is varnished using the exact formula from 1852. The tintype literally will last generations.
