Wet plate Collodion is an ancient photographic technique dating back to the mid 19th century. Glass or metal plates are coated with collodion and sensitized in a silver nitrate solution before being exposed in a camera, more commonly a field or studio camera (the big wooden ones with bellows) then developed and fixed immadiately to reveal the image. The process is slow in the sense that you must d
o everything at the moment you are going to take the picture and exposure times are fairly long and can range for under a second to quite a few minutes depending on the light available. The dried plate can then be varnished with Shellac, Sandarac and lavender oil, or waxed with Renaissance wax. This technique allows one great advantage when doing portraits. You cannot keep your camera face on for that long, the real you comes through. Collodion has a particular look to it. A lot of its charms comes from what emanates from the subject but also because of the unique "faults" caused by the chemistry. Each plate (picture) is unique this way. The chemistry and the handmade nature of it will never make 2 portraits identical. You might say you can scan it and print it and while this is true, the plate has a different, richer, deeper, clearer quality to it that no digital version can capture and holding an object in your hand has a different feel to it than staring at a jpg on a screen. For more info contact us at [email protected]
