At the beginning of the year, I enrolled in a wetplate collodion workshop with Will Dunniway (www.collodion-artist.com) in Corona, California. The class, which lasted two days, was a crash course on the basics of making tintypes and glass negatives. This process was invented by Fredrick Scott Archer and dates back to 1851. For the life of me, I can't believe he figured out how to make this process work. It is a time consuming process that requires you to sensitize, shoot, develop and fix the plate while it is still wet. A bit toxic, but the uncertainty of it all is magic.
I went back to work with Will again to see how I could create some tintypes of my athlete portraits and to shoot some tintypes of some model cars for a book project. Here are a few images we created.
O.J. Mayo
Darren McFadden
Deadly Comet
Dwayne Jarrett