In June 2023, I was fortunate to learn tintype photography at a “Camp Tintype” workshop with legendary alternative process photographer, John Coffer. https://www.johncoffer.com John lives on a farm in Dundee, in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of NY. For nearly thirty years, people have traveled from across the world to learn from John. I was lucky to find that my farm is only an hour’s drive to his rustic open-air photography studio.
Equipped with my 1920s era Seneca Improved View Camera made nearby in Rochester NY, camping supplies, my fiddle, food and water, I arrived at Camp Tintype on a Wednesday evening. I was feeling quite disoriented when I arrived because plumes of wildfire smoke from the Canadian wildfires had blanked the entire Finger Lakes area all week, turning our bucolic paradise into an apocalyptic nightmare. I had been wearing a respirator for days, and wore it the entire drive through the orange haze. Fortunately, once I arrived at Camp Tintype, I was able to ditch the respirator when I noticed that the smoke there was not too bad. I was greeted by John and his cat Tabby, and his countless cows and other farm animals.
John started off teaching four students per workshop, but has recently switched to three. I was fortunate to be in class with two incredible people, Kim and Tim. Kim came all the way from California with her young son and her older son’s girlfriend to babysit, and Tim came from nearby Rochester, NY.
Wednesday night, John showed us how to make tintype photos using a regular darkroom enlarger. Tintype (often called “ferrotype”) photography is a direct positive process, meaning what you see on the ground glass of your camera is what your photograph will look like. To make a tintype with an enlarger, you cannot use a negative image. You must use a positive image. A color slide, or an actual printed photograph, will work just fine. Essentially, you project the image onto a metal plate prepared with collodion and silver nitrate, then develop and fix it like any other tintype. I plan to explore this method more in the future.
After the enlarger demo, we helped John set up his tepee for me to camp in. It’s called “Camp Tintype” because John invites students to camp at his farm for the duration of the course.
Thursday, the first full day of the workshop, John taught us all about ferrotype photography, and a lot of what not to do. He showed us different cameras, lenses, at wet plate holders, along with examples of tintypes taken on different material (blackened aluminum trophy plates versus “real”, Japanned steel plates), and fixed with different fixers. We learned how to pour collodion on a plate, and by the very end of the day, we each had the opportunity to play around with John’s huge studio camera and take a few shots.
The next three days were fully immersive, shoot all day experiences, peppered with information and How-tos. John let me borrow a beautifully made wet plate holder (made by Chamonix cameras in China) since my camera had come with dry plate holders, but I hadn’t yet converted them to wet plate use. I was pleased to see that it worked perfectly with my camera! We students posed for each other around John’s farm, and each took photographs of John, who is truly a seasoned wet plate model. Here is a tintype I took of John with his horse-drawn manure spreader:
After dinner each evening, we reconvened in John’s log cabin to varnish our plates, an important final step in making a tintype image. We heated the plates up, then poured a coat of sandarac or shellac varnish over our plates to protect the images and prevent the silver from tarnishing over time.
On Sunday, my friends, Leah and Jason, paid us a visit, and were fabulous models.
