Few days ago I visited Borut Peterlin, a pro photographer based in Dolenjske Toplice. He started with wet collodion process and ambrotype photography recently and he agreed to show me how this process works. I drove to his place where he set up a home studio to process the photos and we agreed to make a few portraits. First we tried to make a wet collodion negative on glass with a massive view camera made by Idro Celje. the camera itself is huge and together with custom made tripod feels more like a tank than a camera.

Borut tried newly acquired Voigtländer lens but we did not get good results. The portraits we made were not sharp and we decided to try with much smaller (still very big though) camera Kodak Brownie. With this camera a large format film can be used but we wanted to stick with the 19. century techniques so we used aluminium plates and a wet collodion technique called ambrotype or collodion positive. The difference is that you get a positive image as an end result and not negative as with glass plates.

It took us about four hours to set up everything and to make three portraits. The exposure time is very hard to determine as there is no light meter in the camera and the sensibility of the wet collodion is approximately 8-12 ISO equivalent. It also depends on the thickness of the layer you put on the plate itself and on the development of the photo in the darkroom. For these three photos below the exposure time was around 4-5 seconds at f11. You can notice Borut’s dog is all blurry cause he moved during the exposure. it gives the photo even more vintage feel.

We were both pleased with the results and somewhere in the future I might even try this technique myself – it’s quite addictive! Below you can check out few more shots from that day.

To read more about these cameras and techniques visit Borut peterlin’s blog where he describes his experiments in 19.century photography.