Civil War-era tintypes were taken on thin plates of black aluminum.
In the age of Snapchat and Instagram, smartphones and tablets, it’s almost impossible to imagine a time when horses carted around darkrooms, and photo portraits took several hours, rather than a few minutes or seconds.
But such a time existed. And one Connecticut photographer is set on bringing it back.
On a recent episode of WNPR’s Where We Live, photographer and filmmaker Ty Morin spoke about his passion for tintype photography, a photographic process dating back to the Civil War era.
Check out the video below to watch Morin create a tintype of Where We Live host John Dankosky:
According to Morin, 19th-century tintypes were taken on thin plates of black aluminum. To take a photograph, a photographer began by pouring a collodion emulsion over one of the black plates, before dipping it into a bath of silver nitrate.
The plate was then inserted into a large-format camera, much like a piece of film. With the plate in place, the photographer was ready to make an exposure, which could last from a fraction of a second to several seconds.
When the exposure was complete, the plate was carefully removed from the camera, and taken into a darkroom. There, the photographer poured developer over it before placing it into a potassium cyanide fixing bath to stop the development process.
The resulting image was then air-dried and finished off with a coat of varnish to make it more long-lasting.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Tucker Ives contributed to this post.
