One of the first digital negative to tintypes I made came from a color negative, a medium format Kodak Portra 160VC negative, taken on a Yashica Mat TLR, and scanned on an Imacon 848. The image had a bit of fogging because of the humidity and heat damage from traveling in Kathmandu, Nepal during monsoon season.
I was curious to see how well the color negative would translate into a tintype, and spent quite a long time converting the image to black and white trying to fix the film fogged area. Printed out the negative full-frame. It came out beautifully!
One of the things I love and hate about the Wet-plate collodion process is the volatility. Not literally how flammable the materials are but how you never really know what’s going to happen in the darkroom. It’s flexible yet simultaneously persnickity, sorta like a small child. I love the bubbles that appeared and the blue hue that emerged where the collodion was thick!
I made these for fun and to do a consistency test. The George Eastman 3 cent stamps were scanned on a professional flatbed scanner, converted to black and white, and printed a little smaller than the 4×5″ negative size. They were enlarged to an 8×10″ to see how well I could develop the plate. It’s nice to give yourself little tests, helps keep ya on your toes, and satisfies whimsical curiosity. The plate shown is the first one I made.