GREAT WEST
TINTYPES
Great West Tintypes produces historic tintype portraits from the heart of the Mountain West. In Steamboat Springs, Colorado and throughout the Northwest Colorado region, capture your true essence through our one-of-kind heirloom images.
what is tintype photography?
Tintypes are a vintage-style photo that creates an image on a thin piece of aluminum with black enamel. First described by Adolphe-Alexandre Martin in France in 1853, the tintype was patented by Hamilton Smith in the United States in 1856. Easy and inexpensive to make, tintypes were popular among soldiers during the Civil War and used throughout the 19th century. Tintypes provided soldiers and their distant families with images of their loved ones to carry with them.
How does it work?
In the “wet plate” process, an emulsion made from cotton dissolved in ethanol coats a black, thin plate of aluminum. From there, the plate enters the silver bath, where the silver nitrate binds to the collodion to create a light sensitive film made up of suspended silver halide crystals. When silver halide crystals are struck by light, silver ions are formed. The grains of silver create an image by reacting to the light in different places, creating different quantities of silver ions. When the plate is developed, the crystals are reduced to microscopic particles of metallic silver depending on intensity and duration of their exposure to light. The plate must then be stopped and fixed so that the silver halide crystals are removed and only the metallic silver is left - resulting in a visible positive image. Pretty simple, right?
