The Betty Brinn Children's Museum was out at Lynden Sculpture Garden today shooting Tintype portraits of visitors. I had an all star team today consisting of Meg Zimont, Bill Pariso and myself. We rolled in at 11:30 AM and got setup and within the first 10 minutes we had our first customers of the day. The above group of girls was enjoying the garden for a 11th birthday party.
What better way to remember a birthday than with a 100 year old photography process? I wish I even knew the dry plate process when I was eleven. I hope we created some future photographers in this group of ladies. They were rockstars when they posed for their photo, didn't move a muscle!
After the quick photo, they explored the Camera Obscura trailer that allows visitors to crawl inside a 4' x 6' trailer to see exactly what a camera sees, the world upside-down and backwards. While Bill walked the group through the trailer, I started developing the photos in the mobile darkroom.
And after about 5-10 minutes in a light proof box I was able to show this eager group their photographs! It was a great feeling to have the first 3 prints show up. Today's photo plates and chemistry were about a month old, which isn't that old, but its always nerve racking going out to events like this because the last thing you want to happen is expired chemistry.
After the first group left, more and more people visited us. Bill invited people to explore the trailer, Meg was on camera, and I processed all of the photos.
But one after another, they all turned out.
The bright light today really helped with the exposure times. Typically when I would run events inside and would have to rely on my studio lights the exposure time would be 8 seconds at f/4.7. But today we were able to shoot all these photos at 1/25 at f/4.7. The fast shutter speed eliminated a lot of the ghostly, blurry focus because very few people can hold still for the full 8 seconds.
Here is a close up of the first group of girls. Happy 11th Birthday!
This couple was super nice and didn't really know what to expect from the process, but throughout the course of the day, the gentleman asked for photo after photo. I think this couple ended up taking home three prints. It is super encouraging to meet people like this that really appreciate what you are doing and supporting the arts.
Print after print...
Everything went so well.
Now at this point in the day, most people were getting ready to go, and were getting excited to take their prints home. Initially when we started today I was thinking about asking everyone if we took two images, that they could take one home, and we would get to keep the other one as a sample for the future of this project. Well that went out the window real fast...
So in order to document this day, and show all of the readers the outcome of the day. I specifically asked everyone I could if I could take their photograph with their tintype.
And a close up.
Jeff's face says it all, everyone involved in this tintype workshop had so much fun.
But you know it is so bitter sweet. Looking back at all the amazing tintype photos that Meg, Bill and I captured today, these were probably the best we have ever shot together. Sometimes I wish we could keep at least one of the photos that we gave away for our records so that in the future we have good examples to show at future events, but everyone always takes the good ones, what's up with that!
Joking aside, I am so thankful for everyone that came out and interacted with us. It was great to hear all your stories and meet a lot of new friends.
Stay tuned!
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