Tintypes! Kind of.
My neighborhood Buy Nothing group is pretty great. I mostly love using it to get rid of things that I no longer need but know are still in good shape. But I felt like I hit the jackpot last week when someone else in the group was giving away a tintype kit with all of the chemistry and I was lucky enough to receive it! Alternative or old timey photography and free stuff? Sign me up.
My first thought was to team up with my friend Devon because she is always the first person I think of when it comes to fun photo adventures. This past Sunday was a bright sunny day so we felt like it was the perfect forecast to bring out my pinhole camera and see what we could do. I turned a bathroom with no windows into a makeshift darkroom, coated the tin with the emulsion, and crossed my fingers that we would work some magic.
We started out with a two minute long exposure. Nothing. Well, okay, let’s go up to a five minute exposure (which was more like a 10 minute exposure because I didn’t actually start the timer…). Still nothing.
Look at those shadows! We had such high hopes.
By the time we were up to a one hour exposure time, we pretty much knew that this was a bust. I even did a two hour long exposure and still got nothing. So what happened? It could have been any number of things, really. I might have inadvertently exposed everything to light in the bathroom , I might not have coated the plates correctly with the emulsion, the chemistry in the kit might have been contaminated or expired before I even got the kit!
Safe to say that I definitely coated the plates poorly when they turned out like this…
However, I wasn’t all that sad about the tintypes. I got the kit for free and we still had fun setting up the photos and hanging out during the long long exposure times. Plus, it wasn’t a total fail. Turns out, there’s an Instagram filter for everything! You just need someone like Devon to be able to show it to you.
Added bonus: I could take these faux tintypes inside which OBVIOUSLY meant I immediately started taking them of Toopie!
