What yer lookin at is actually an Ambrotype - a positive image on glass with a black background. A Tintype is the same process but on a black metal plate.
After fighting for a year with the "modern tintype" chemistry made by a company called Rockland, I was getting less than 10% useable plates because of unreliable chemicals so I decided to step back in time and do tintypes the way they were done between 1850 and 1900.
I picked up a couple of books by the two people who are the modern masters of wet plate photography (the process by which tintypes were made), stocked up on a not-so-small fortune in chemicals, and jumped in head first.
Wet plate photography is "baking from scratch", using compounds of basic chemicals (collodion, ether, alcohol, various iodides, ferrous sulphate, and so forth) to make a collodion coating, a silver nitrate sensitizer bath, developer, and fixer.
A metal or glass plate is coated with the collodion mixture and then soaked for a few minutes in a silver bath to become light sensitive. The plate is then loaded in the camera, exposed, and developed while still wet (hence the term "wet plate"). The plate is the fixed (to remove excess silver), rinsed, and then varnished.
The wet plate process was used from the 1840s thru to 1900 and was the only form of photography in common use until the late 1880s when George Eastman developed a dry plate process.
The plate yer lookin at was scratch-baked, just like in Civil War times, 'n' the view is out my kitchen window. I'z just learning the process and werkin on my "techniques" right now, getting ready fer next year.
In Civil War Reenacting circles thar's a number of wet plate (or sometimes called collodion) photographers 'n' I figgered it's time somebody offered real period-correct photography fer the Cowboy Action shooters. Since the Rocklands stuff didn't werk out, we'z now goin 100% authentic!
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