A Little Homage

I posted a couple of days ago an article called Its All About The Attitude and in the post I wrote about a photographer called Victoria Will. She spent some time this year at the Sundance Film Festival and she photographed celebrities. The style she used to photograph her subjects was to use a large format camera using a style of photography called Tintype or more commonly known as wet plate.

As portrait photographer this really interests me, I do like to play with film and have a selection of vintage film cameras I still use. But one thing I have never done is wet plate photography and believe me it is on my bucket list.

I thought I would just throw in a little homage to Victoria but not having access to any wet plate materials I had to look for an alternative. So I turned to my iPhone and a fantastic little App called Hipstamatic which one of many different photography Apps on the market today that emulates classic film looks. Personally I think it is the best and it does a great job. I have also discovered since visiting the website they have an App just dedicated to Tintype styling.

So I found a view willing subjects and took some shots, I know the purists out there will say this is nothing like the the real thing, but before you jump of that high horse your sitting on. This is just a homage an experiment. Personally for me there are not enough blacks, the images aren’t contrasty enough for me but Hipstamatic does an ok job, I would recommend this App every time. Its very versatile and doesn’t just shoot Tinytype, the classic App has many different lenses , film and flash types to keep you more occupied creating great images. Victoria Will’s set up was a little different to mine, she used strobes to light her subjects I only had window light. But for an overall effect I don’t think it was a bad job, I will re-visit this with different kinds of lighting and also try out Hipstamatics App that is a dedicated Tintype camera.