The silver paved road

I’ve never been a fan of silver, or gold for that matter… At least not until I stumbled upon the wet collodion process 4 years ago. I was visiting Amsterdam when I noticed, in one of those small tourist plazas, a big wooden camera set on an wooden tripod. I’m a big fan of history of photography now, but back then I wasn’t familiar with this process. I just knew I had to check it out and take a picture.

Imagine my surprise to see that it was a working camera, next to the photographer making images on the spot just as they used to make around 1850s all over Europe. The photographer was Hungarian and his girlfriend was the assistance. The line was quite huge, enough to not be able to get a chance of a photo that day. Lucky enough I managed to squeeze in the next day and decided on a tintype, thinking a glass plate might not survive a plane flight. Will get more technical later, but for now, a tintype is a photograph on a thin aluminum sheet.

So, I finely got to sit in front of that big wooden camera and was asked to stay still for about 3 or 4 seconds and got me a tintype. A silver image on aluminum, souvenir from Amsterdam… The rest is history and a great story which I will detail in here, so don’t go too far.