A 4x5″ tintype of Millennium Bridge with St Paul’s in the background. As this is an in-camera ferrotype, the image is reversed left to right. The camera used, if you are interested in that sort of thing, is a hacked up Polaroid 800 from the late 1950s fitted with lens and bellows of a Polaroid 110 from the early 1960s, open backed to put a 4x5 (or whatever) in place.
Something a little different today and work in progress - I’ve been playing with some old processes lately. This is a 4x5″ tintype/ferrotype similar to how they did it in the 1870s. The substrate is japanned metal. It is sensitised by concocting then pouring a runny emulsion over the substrate. Equivalent film speed is approx 1/2 (one half) ISO (ordinary ‘film’ or digital is ISO100-400). The plate is developed and fixed much like traditional paper processes. It then has to be varnished/lacquered to protect. In case it isn’t obvious, the emulsion is actually a negative, but if you place a negative against a black background it becomes positive.
It is a fiddly process fraught with error and surprise. The finished product is somewhat three dimensional and changes colour depending on light, the blues you see here are more often black. You can do the process in the darkroom at print time but I am doing in-camera tintypes so they are one of a kind objects. I kinda like the result and am considering a project using the technique.
The Barbican, London. Yesterday.
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I’ve been a bit busy lately, as you may have noticed, and broken the cardinal sin of not posting often enough to my blog. Here are a couple of pictures.
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