View Don’s wet plate collodion photography galleries …
The Wet Plate Photography Process …
If you’re an artist or craftsman, you’ll appreciate the incredible manual process involved in wet plate collodion photography. From cutting the plate, wiping egg-white along its edges, coating it evenly with collodion, making it light-sensitive with silver nitrate, loading the wet plate carefully into a dark slide that goes into the camera and removing the lens cap to take the photograph. And then there’s the entire developing process. Done onsite in a mobile lab.
Sitting for Your Don Jones Wet Plate Collodion Photographic Portrait
When you sit for a Don Jones wet plate portrait, you’ll quickly learn this is not a point and shoot operation. It’s a craft. And it will take some time. So please be patient. Ask some questions. Talk to us about the process. Think about the history of it all. And think about those who sat for a very similar portrait more than 150 years ago.
Making Your Don Jones Wet Plate Portrait Special
We want to make your portrait extremely artistic and personal. So take some time to decide how you’d like to be photographed. In your house or at a favorite outdoors location? Close up or further away from the camera? What would you like to wear? Think about it. And when we visit, we’ll determine exactly what’s possible or not with our wet plate.
The Unique Elegance of Your Don Jones Wet Plate Collodion Photographic Portrait
Your cut, chemically-prepared, exposed, developed and preserved wet plate positive is a singular, unreproducible piece of craft and art. If you wish, we can ‘float’ your plate in a shadow-box frame. We can also take an extremely high-res photo of the plate and make prints on museum-quality paper in various sizes and quantifies. We can even matte and frame your prints. Just let us know what you’d like to do and we’ll price out the options.
