Digital Wet Plate Photography

Welcome to my Digital Wet Plate page. I coined Digital Wet Plate last year to describe the process of making simulated Wet Plate Collodion photographs with a common digital camera.

I've played around modifying color photos to look old but you end up second guessing if the photo looks good or not. I was looking for samples of old photos for reference and found two interesting web sites on creating new Wet Plate Collodion photographs using the original methods. See R. J. Szabo's site for details of Wet Plate Collodion photography and the gallery of his photographs. I was impressed with photos by John A. Coffer, especially the photo of The National Regiment on his home page. Wet Plate Collodion photography is a real art that I don't have the patients or the time to learn and master. But looking at all the cool photographs gave me an idea of using my digital camera to take old looking photos.

I researched the old cameras the best I could to try to duplicate the effect. I'm still experimenting and will add more details at a later date. My original thought was to use the photographs without any modifications on the computer, but after my first test at Neshaminy 2005 reenactment I found it hard not to get "modern" items or people in the shots. For example the photo at the right had an asphalt path with people in the distance and a person shooting video on the left side. the photo is too good to throw out. My latest idea is to only modify photos using pieces of photos taken the same day at the same event. In the photo at right the dirt road came from another photo taken at the Federal camp. I'll also add tutorials at a later date.