Wet plate collodion photography is a very old form of taking photographs that originates around the time of the 1850's when Frederick Scott Archer first published details about the wet plate collodion process. The wet plate collodion process essentially had a stranglehold on the photography industry for the next thirty years until the introduction of the dry plate photography method in the 1880's. The method used before wet plate collodion, which was known as the Daguerreotype process, was that with wet plate the image taken could be viewed correctly and not laterally reversed as it appeared with the Daguerreotype process. Furthermore, another huge advantage this process had over the Daguerreotype was that the process was much quicker, resulting in the customer being able to obtain their finished photograph within minutes. However, this new process was dangerous and took practice to master due to all the chemicals involved.
The wet plate collodion process was quite lengthy and dangerous, it involved having a piece of either clear or black glass, which the black glass was usually used for positives and the clear glass was usually used for negatives. Then the next step is deburring the glass, which was a required step to make it less likely that the photographer would be cut especially with the presence of all the chemicals being used. Then the glass needs to be cleaned, in order to stop the collodion from peeling off the glass. Following the cleaning is the process where the collodion is poured onto the glass plate, it is known as "flowing the plate", which is one of the harder steps due to the technique requiring practice to master; this helps reveal any defects, imperfections, or ridges on the plate glass. The next step is to sensitize the plate, in which the plate glass is submerged in silver nitrate for three to four minutes. Exposing the plate is the next step, which can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes; the exposure process can vary in time depending on the amount of light, and what the photographer is hoping to achieve. Next, the plate is developed, a fifteen to twenty second process, but the photographer has to be experienced because otherwise the plate can be either under developed or under developed. Finally, the plate glass must be fixed. In this process the plate is fixed usually by potassium cyanide in which the image goes from being a bluish negative to a warm positive ambrotype. The danger of this process comes from the sharp edges that glass can yield, as well as the various chemicals used to process the image in order to obtain the final result.
As Quinn Jacobson puts it in his video The Wet Plate Collodion Process: "Collodion photography is both difficult and somewhat dangerous to do."
There were two types of processes being tinkered with at the time of the wet plate collodion process, one being called ambrotype which was the first one, and the other being called Ferrotype, or Tinytype as it was known by in slang terms at the time, being the second process to be discovered. An ambrotype is simply put, an under exposed negative that is held against a dark background appears as a positive image. The transition from ambrotype to Ferrotype came in the 1850's when a photographer instead of using a black backed glass plate as a support for a positive image, used a thin shiny black lacquered iron sheet. This allowed for a much cheaper and more robust product to be produced, thus leading to the Ferrotype process. Even though the Ferrotype process produces laterally reversed images, which the ambrotype does not, it still won out in the end due to the cheapness of the process and product, and the fact that Ferrotypes could be fitted into albums and shipped in envelopes a lot easier than the ambrotypes could be.
Photo by: Frank Albert Rinehart
Image Source: http://anthonylukephotography.blogspot.com/2012/02/fascinating-18th-century-portraits-of.html
Despite the major differences in the processes between wet plate collodion and the type of technology that is used today in terms of photography, that technology being known as digital photography, the essence has always been the same. Photography, and photojournalism, have always been about taking pictures and basically telling a story with that picture, which is where the word photojournalism gets its name from. Although the methodology between the past and present has changed dramatically in terms of how those story-telling images, pictures, and photographs are taken, the idea and principle behind it all has remained the same.
Looking at the word photograph and breaking it down shows the origination of photojournalism as Professor John Nordell explains the root of the word in his video Before There Were Pixels - Part 1: "From photos, light, and graphos, writing delineation, or painting."
One of the biggest changes for the technology behind taking pictures was the discovery of digital cameras, which could take multiple pictures, process, and save them all without having to go through the whole wet plate process so that way photographers did not have to rely on just getting one good picture but could capture a whole number of images. With digital photography, came another invention for cameras called a motor drive. This allowed for fast-paced events to be captured frame by frame, which was never before possible due to the slow picture-taking process of cameras that preceded the motor drive attachment.
As Professor John Nordell describes the function of a motor drive in his video Before There Were Pixels - Part 2: "One thing that was rather important, you can see on the bottom of this camera there's this extra area, and this was called a motor drive. And with that, instead of just taking a single picture, you could, when I hold the shutter button down, it takes a series of pictures rapidly up to maybe ten frames per second, or ten images per second."
By the time World War Two rolled around, the motor drive had not been invented yet, and neither had reliable ways of taking and saving images that had been captured been developed. Robert Capa, a Hungarian-born photojournalist renowned for his wartime photographs that he took, especially those he took on June 6, 1944, AKA D-Day. Robert Capa once stated a line that became famous and synonymous for photographers and photojournalists alike:"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." So Robert Capa, on D-Day sharing a landing craft, landed with the troops on Omaha Beach with his camera in order to take pictures of the action. Capa's first issue was obviously surviving the onslaught that met him and the troops on the beach, then his second issue was capturing the images and being able to correctly process them so that way they could actually be viewed. Today digital photography is certainly taken for granted, the ease of which photographs are able to be taken and saved was something that could only be desired back in Capa's day.
Of the 106 frames and three rolls that Robert Capa exposed on June 6, 1944, only ten were useful: "A darkroom technician was almost as anxious to see the invasion images as Capa himself. In his haste, the technician dried the film too quickly. The excess heat melted the emulsion on all but 10 of the frames. Those that remained were blurred, surreal shots, which succinctly conveyed the chaos and confusion of the day."
Photo by: Patrick Agit
This is a photograph that I took with the camera on my phone, it is of a lounge area at my internship. The vastness in difference in technology between wet plate collodion and digital photography means that in order to capture this image all I had to do was point my phone's camera in the direction of the desired setting and click the electronic shutter button on my phone's screen. Had I been using the wet plate collodion process I would have to stand there for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes waiting for the image to be processed. Then I would have to take the exposed frame and go through the whole wet plate collodion process simply for one photograph. Also, digital photography allows for instant viewing of the captured image, allowing the photographer to decide if they are satisfied with the result or take more pictures in order to achieve the desired outcome. On a further note, the digital camera used to capture this image also has the capability of capturing a video and taking photographic images as the video is being recorded at the same time, something which the photographers and photojournalists of the nineteenth century would never have though possible simply because the technology during that time was no where near what is possible today.
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