Collodion Dry Plate

thuggins · Jun 11, 2020

Has anyone here tried collodion dry plates? The history searxch here for dry plate appears to deal with gelatine.

I've read that tannic acid is added to the collodion to allow permiability for the developer, but details are very sparse.

kevin klein · Jun 23, 2020

The plates are subbed with albumen, tannic acid is the preservative and is flowed on the sensitized plate, NOT put in collodion.

thuggins · Jun 25, 2020

kevin klein said:
The plates are subbed with albumen, tannic acid is the preservative and is flowed on the sensitized plate, NOT put in collodion.

That's not what I'm referring to. There is a dry collodion process. The speed is very slow (like 15 to 30 minute exposures). There are a couple of 130+ year old mentions of it, but very short on details.

Jerevan · Jun 25, 2020

I think Mark Osterman at the Eastman Museum is the one to ask, since he does old processes like this: https://www.eastman.org/event/workshops/canceled-dry-collodion-negatives-and-salt-printing or have a look at http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/gloss7.html# . I know there was an actual recipe somewhere on the internets, but I can't find it anymore.

ThePhotoChemist · Jul 14, 2020

I remember trying this once years and years ago. The dude's website is gone now, but there is a web archive of the recipe page:

https://web.archive.org/web/2018080...l Photography/DryPlateProcess/DryProcess.html

After sensitizing the collodion plate you wash it in a tannic acid solution and allow it to dry. They are a lot slower than wet plates, and you use a pyro based physical developer to develop them.

removed account4 · Jul 14, 2020

I was talking to someone, a month or 2 ago about something like this, and was told something about using HONEY on a collodion plate to preserve it after exposed ( or something like that ). Does that have anything to do with this dry collodion plate process or is that something different altogether ? As you can see I know just enough to get myself in trouble.

ThePhotoChemist · Jul 14, 2020

I think it's pretty closely related, here's a section of The Silver Sunbeam that talks about the tannin/honey process: https://web.archive.org/web/2018021...us.org/library/monographs/sunbeam/chap37.html

Jerevan · Jul 15, 2020

ThePhotoChemist said:
I remember trying this once years and years ago. The dude's website is gone now / .../

Thanks for the link - it has been buggering me for a while now that I couldn't find it. Perhaps it is something along those lines that Mark Osterman is working with. Man, I wish could attend one of those George Eastman Museum courses in the non-covid19 future ...

thuggins · Aug 3, 2020

That archived web page is great, with all of the detail of steps to actually do it. Given the timing constraints of wet plate, I'm surprised that more folks aren't trying this.

J 3 · Aug 5, 2020

I think Mark Osterman was doing the print out version for obtaining prints off of negatives -
The Silver Sunbeam section is the only description of the in-camera developed version of this process I know of. It was a rare process because it was slower than wet plate and the cameras of the time were already struggling with exposure times. Pretty quickly silver gelatin won out.

Donald Qualls · Aug 5, 2020

This is interesting. I wonder if anyone has done a side by side comparison of qualities like grain between wet plate and dry collodion? I remember reading that this dry collodion (as referenced above on Tai Oliphant's page) came along just as silver gelatin dry plates appeared. Being even slower than wet plate, I can see why dry collodion would have lost out in comparison to gelatin dry plates -- but the ability to make full quality plates yourself, and store them for up to a year, then process them with long lasting chemistry, seems very attractive -- especially if they enlarge well, too.

removed account4 · Aug 5, 2020

man, I love photography, what cool stuff in this thread !

J 3 · Aug 5, 2020

Donald Qualls said:
I wonder if anyone has done a side by side comparison of qualities like grain between wet plate and dry collodion? I remember reading that this dry collodion (as referenced above on Tai Oliphant's page) came along just as silver gelatin dry plates appeared.

I would love to see such a comparison. I mean to try the old dry plate formulas some day.

These emulsions tend to be in the realm of what we'd call microfilm emulsions today being very slow, contasty but incredibly high resolution. It was quite possible to homebrew gelatin dry plates back then. It was just a bit more involved. What happened was that gelatin was able to be commercialized - it was much more profitable to sell a stack of prefab plates that a bottle of chemicals. Folks started becoming secretive about each advancement and people found it easier just to buy commercial plates. Collodion did hold on for some time though precisely because it was known and easy to replicate. Collodion also held on in some specialized applications like the emulsions for Stranhope micrographs and of course collodion on paper had its time along side the more common albumin.

Donald Qualls · Aug 6, 2020

Seems I recall collodion tintype continuing, in the form of the traveling portraitist with his horse-drawn wagon, into the 1920s, and a (very) few fixed-location portrait photographers continuing to use it even longer than that -- which is how the "skill" part of the process came down to the present.

Seems to me collodion dry plates could have been sold commercially, with a little more applied science to making the plates last longer in storage (but a year wasn't bad; what was the shelf life of a gelatin dry plate in 1875?), but in that market, the low sensitivity was a killer. Highly flammable sensitizers and developers were another issue, in the days when a safelight was a candle or kerosene lamp...

removed account4 · Aug 6, 2020

Donald Qualls said:
Seems I recall collodion tintype continuing, in the form of the traveling portraitist with his horse-drawn wagon, into the 1920s

some of the tintypes in the 20s were silver gelatin ( direct positive ) tintypes (like rockland colloid currently sells ) . street photographers also had similar direct positive paper post. cards I wish I could remember the company Mandellette / Chicago Post Card Company ? had proprietary papers and developers that were similar to the dry plate tintypes ... developed in a 2 tank system. mono bath developer and a bleach/fixer .. I remastered SGtintypes of my grandfather from around that time period (. or probably before that ) distant relatives taken by a carnival or street photographer...

thuggins · Aug 7, 2020

Donald Qualls said:
Being even slower than wet plate, I can see why dry collodion would have lost out in comparison to gelatin dry plates --

The contemporary article I had originally encountered touted the slowness as an advantage. The author said they were perfect for landscape, city scenes, etc, where a "carriage passing by" would spoil a wet plate exposure. Such transient elements would not be visible given the long exposure of the dry plate.

Before the current craziness caused so many public spaces to empty out, I thought it would be cool to do a project with cities and buildings "devoid of people".

Donald Qualls · Aug 7, 2020

thuggins said:
Before the current craziness caused so many public spaces to empty out, I thought it would be cool to do a project with cities and buildings "devoid of people".

That's been one of the attractions of pinhole, at least for some. The minutes- or hours-long exposures have the same effect -- anything in motion isn't recorded, or shows only as a ghostly trail.

J 3 · Aug 20, 2020

jnantz said:
some of the tintypes in the 20s were silver gelatin ( direct positive ) tintypes (like rockland colloid currently sells ) . street photographers also had similar direct positive paper post. cards I wish I could remember the company Mandellette / Chicago Post Card Company ? had proprietary papers and developers that were similar to the dry plate tintypes ... developed in a 2 tank system. mono bath developer and a bleach/fixer .. I remastered SGtintypes of my grandfather from around that time period (. or probably before that ) distant relatives taken by a carnival or street photographer...

I've often wondered about this. Rockland seems to claim in their marketing that dry plate gelatin tintype is a historical process, but I've never come across anything to back up that claim or provide a date / context to this. Maybe it was these post cards you mention from the 20s. Tintype was fairly anachronistic by the 1920's but it would make sense for traveling photographers. Polaroid wasn't invented til '37 and seemingly b&w reversal (via special development or special emulsions) wasn't commercially available til much later. This would fill the niche of quick, cheap photographs.

I've not researched this extensively but I've never really come across much reference to actual dry plate tintypes in the old west time period. The collodion dry plates were glass plate negatives meant for salt and albumin prints. These were replaced by gelatin dry plates pretty quickly because of the easy speed boosts that could be obtained (heating the plates for example). Wet plate tintypes were common because they were very fast to make, not because people liked the grey on black look. Collodion dry plate seems to have been too slow for portrait work, and so although you could in theory make a quick to produce tintype / ambrotype out of the emulsion, I don't know there would have been any reason to do so.

If anyone knows for sure what dry plate tintypes Rockland is modeled after, Id be curious to learn the history.

Donald Qualls · Aug 20, 2020

J Nanian seems convinced that dry gelatin was used for tintypes, starting in the 1870s when dry gelatin was the New Big Thing.

J 3 · Aug 20, 2020

Donald Qualls said:
J Nanian seems convinced that dry gelatin was used for tintypes, starting in the 1870s when dry gelatin was the New Big Thing.

I looked up an image of Mandel positive process postcards and they do have the appearance of a tintype style process (black background and a weak negative that looks as a positive because it reflects more than the background). The ones on this page are quite faded. Good ones look more like a fresh tintype. Interestingly the unexposed postcard is grey but I think it's just been self developed over the years. According to the site these were introduced in 1913. I've not gotten a description absolutely proving these postcards were effectively paper gelatin tintypes but they really do look the part - http://www.vintagephoto.tv/mandelette.shtml

From the J Nanian site Donald Qualls linked to in reference to what was happening much earlier in the 1870's:
...street photographers started to use pre coated metal, glass and paper plates in cameras and process them in a special developer that both developed the image as a negative slowly and bleached it and fixed it and as a result, the processed plate ( glass, metal or paper ) was a direct positive....

That sounds a lot more like reversal black and white. The idea is you bleach the negative image with a non-re-halogenating bleach (permanganate?) and then create a positive with the remaining silver. If that's the case, then the background would be white and the tonal range / look would be much closer to a standard print or perhaps an orotone (which were done I think by exposure to a negative, not direct positive processing). I can't be 100% certain here, because a tintype goes through a series of different looks as it's processed in what is a specialized developer formulated to produce a really faint image. I cant say which of these two the description refers too, but it does sound a lot more like reversal B&W to my ears (like Dr5 or Tri-X reversal movie film).

MattKing · Aug 20, 2020

You could always ask John - now known as jnantz here on photrio.

J 3 · Aug 20, 2020

I asked jnantz about the 1870's photographers.

I found a EU site that claims a few things about the Mandel postcards. They do seem to be essentially gelatin based tintypes on cardboard. The company developed a monobath developer/fixer (they called Wonder Developer) for this so the photos could be quickly in camera. The patent was requested in 1913. The Chicago Ferrotype Company renamed to PDQ (Photo Done Quickly) and made it to the late 50s at least but was done in by Polaroid.

Donald Qualls · Aug 20, 2020

J 3 said:
...street photographers started to use pre coated metal, glass and paper plates in cameras and process them in a special developer that both developed the image as a negative slowly and bleached it and fixed it and as a result, the processed plate ( glass, metal or paper ) was a direct positive....

That sounds a lot more like reversal black and white.

B&W reversal cannot be done in a monobath -- but isn't necessary for a tintype. The "reversal" occurs when you fix away the milky halide, leaving the silver image. That silver looks dark against the halide, but becomes the light areas against the black substrate as the halide is dissolved. A conventional monobath, combining highly active developer and fixer, should do the job in a minute or two, and with an "Afghan box camera" that has a ruby window one could even watch the process through the window. It would be more like developing a print than reversal processing a B&W slide. Common graded print emulsion coated on black base could do this -- I wonder if we could get Ilford, Foma, or ORWO to coat prints this way? Ought to be a BUNCH cheaper than Harman Direct Positive (there, you're paying for the pre-exposure that makes the reversal work), and wouldn't really compete because it's a completely different look.

J 3 said:
I asked jnantz about the 1870's photographers.

I found a EU site that claims a few things about the Mandel postcards. They do seem to be essentially gelatin based tintypes on cardboard. The company developed a monobath developer/fixer (they called Wonder Developer) for this so the photos could be quickly in camera. The patent was requested in 1913. The Chicago Ferrotype Company renamed to PDQ (Photo Done Quickly) and made it to the late 50s at least but was done in by Polaroid.

J 3 · Aug 20, 2020

Donald Qualls said:
B&W reversal cannot be done in a monobath -- but isn't necessary for a tintype. The "reversal" occurs when you fix away the milky halide, leaving the silver image. That silver looks dark against the halide, but becomes the light areas against the black substrate as the halide is dissolved.

I wasn't confused on that but I was confused if that's what they were actually doing in 1870's with dry plates. The postcards are from 40 years later.

Messaging with jnantz that sounds like they were doing exactly that in the 1870's, with specialized developers for making appropriately week images on gelatin emulsions. The developers were quite proprietary but that was the premise.

Language doesn't help here of course. The positive produced by 1) producing a weak negative against a back background 2) bleaching out the negative and creating a positive from what remains (slide film) 3) creating a special emulsion that essentially solarizes on exposure like Harmon direct. 4) dye destruction positives like cibachrome.
Are very different. I think Polaroid is different too.

Afgan box camera by my understanding were originally paper negatives with standard developer and fixer trays. The reversal was made by subsequently photographing the resulting paper negative with the same camera (also making left / right correct).

Just wondering, I wonder if a 2 bath true b&w reversal is possible. Bath 1 develops and bleaches. Bath 2 fogs and fixes. It'd be a nasty chemical cocktail because of the dichromate bleach so no one would likely commercially produce it, but it'd be interesting if it's even possible.

removed account4 · Aug 20, 2020

Donald Qualls said:
J Nanian seems convinced that dry gelatin was used for tintypes, starting in the 1870s when dry gelatin was the New Big Thing.

Hi Donald
Dry plates were invented in by Richard Madox in 1871. silver gelatin tintypes were invented and used soon after when people figured out a way to do it. so they could have something that looked like a tintype without having to deal with cyanide or explosive materials, when? I have no idea. the dry plate tintype developer sold by rockland colloid it is a monobath bleaching developer. it develops and stains and bleaches the image. fixer afterwards fully fixes the image. there were lots of companies that sold their own proprietary reversal (bleaching) developers, and if you dig on the internet hard enough you might find some. silver gelatin tintypes are not made the same way as wet collodion tintypes. they are not made from a weak image with a black backing they are a bleached image with a black backing. two completely different things.
suggesting that people didn't tinker and figure stuff out as soon as something was invented is kind of funny, its like suggesting people didn't figure out how to retouch or fake reality using daguerreotypes ( like photoshop today ) or colorize them. when they were doing it pretty much as soon as daguerreotypes being invented ( same with salt prints ) or people not figuring out how to modify, retouch or work with silver gelatin negatives or prints soon after they were invented, or digital photography soon after it was invented. basically we have what we have with photography today ( and computers and everything else ) is because people took what they were given and tinkered with it to make something new / different.

hi j3
with regards to the afghan camera
https://afghanboxcamera.com
and Joe v. uses these cameras today

Collodion Dry Plate

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