Tintype Photography - A second try

Here are a few more shots with my tintype kit. I think the emulsion is too thick, I was able to put a more consistent and thinner coating on this batch of plates and it looks like they exposed better but something is still not right and the bubbles were a surprise as I was very careful to clean the plates with rubbing alcohol and did not touch either the plates or emulsion so not sure with that either. I am gonna try and pour some more plates this week, maybe the 3rd try will be the charm.

Rocky Bones my dog makes a great model


Except when he moves during a 3 second exposure


This one was underexposed for Rocky but the background seemed decent...


I have a lot of respect for old time photographers and their perseverance to keep trying new methods to get better results. If you have any experience with tintypes and the Rockland specific emulsions I would love to hear from you!


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First Stab at Tintype Photography

Took the plunge and bought a Rockland Tintype Parlor Kit for my 4x5 large format camera. There is something magical about old time photography and I have been looking at the wet plate process for awhile but decided to try this dry plate method first since it seemed a bit easier to try out and did not involve owning a bunch of darkroom equipment to start with. I have minimal film processing equipment for daylight development but with this tintype kit I was going to need a minimum of a safelight and some kind of darkroom. I did the usual and put a towel around the bathroom door and setup everything  there, it worked fine for the most part.

The process is pretty straight forward

1. Trim the included 4x5 metal plates to fit your camera. In my case it was the 4x5 film holders. I trimmed about 10mm off of one edge and clipped a corner to simulate an actual piece of cut sheet film. This helped me remember to use a single side for the emulsion coating.

2. Warm the emulsion gel in hot water until it become fluid enough to pour and spread onto the metal plates.

*** Start steps that need to be in darkroom with safelight ***

3. Pour and spread the emulsion onto your metal plates.

4. Dry the plates in a completely dark place for about 24 hours. I used a military ammo can since it was the only light tight box I could find.

5. Put the plates in the film holder

*** End steps that need to be in darkroom with safelight ***


When the emulsion was dry and the film holders where ready to go it was just a matter of finding a suitable subject and exposing as normal except for using a blue filter in front of the light meter. Seems the emulsion is only sensitive to blue light. Once exposed you go back into the darkroom with a safelight and process according to the directions. This step is pretty simple, even I was able to do it without too much trouble.

My first try resulted in images that I think are over exposed. I rated the emulsion at ISO 1.6 and probably should have been ISO 3. I have some more plates drying that I will test out this weekend.

Here are two scans of my best photos from the first batch.





Any comments or suggestions about this process would be much appreciated!

Breaking Down a Sunrise Photo

When I got home and looked at this photo on the computer I thought to myself how could the whole sky really look like that, full of deep rich orange color across the whole horizon...it can't be real, you must have Photoshop'd it. But I was there, I took the photograph, it was real. The magic comes from a 500mm zoom lens.

Here is a photo of the same sunrise with a 70mm lens


Here is a photo of the same sunrise with a 500mm lens


You can see in the photo with a 500mm lens the entire sky does seem to be filled with a deep rich orange color but in the 70mm photo you can see that really only a small portion of the sky above the mountains is filled with that wonderful color.

To achieve the panoramic sunrise photo I took 5 photographs with a 50% overlap with the 500mm lens and then stitched them together to get the final result. Zoom lenses can be fun with sunrises or sunsets.

Minolta 500mm Reflex Lens

I have been wanting a quality big zoom lens for several years but they are very expensive and out of my price range. They still are. I recently found a Minolta 500mm f8 Reflex Lens for sale on Craigslist that was in very good condition and at a reasonable price so I bought it. I was not really sure it would produce photographs that I would be happy with knowing all of the pro/cons of a reflex lens so I figured I could always resell it if I was not happy since the price I paid was well below what they normally sell for.

There is one thing that makes this lens unique compared to other mirror reflex lenses, Minolta somehow managed to get their lens to have AF. That makes this lens the only mirror reflex lens to have a working auto focus system, all other mirror lenses are manual focus only. Combine the AF with Sony's built in image stabilization and you have a nice zoom lens and high ISO's are handled pretty well in todays modern digital SLR cameras.

The Minolta 500mm f8 Mirror Reflex Lens


I have not taken the camera out into the field yet but have a few shots from the bay near my work. So far I am impressed with the lens, I think it is a keeper. All of these photos were taken handheld and have a slight bit of PP done, just a default sharpen/vibrance filter was applied. More photos and the EXIF info are in this gallery.

Water Drops

I decided to try and take some pictures of water drops this weekend. It wasn't too hard, I looked around on the Internet for some guidelines and found one site with some simple ideas so I tried them as best I could. I did not have any of the more fancy equipment, just a regular Sony DSLR camera and built in flash. Below are some of the pictures I liked best.

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