For about a little over a month I have been MIA due to travel, but now that I have been back, and officially doing wet plate again, I have something to show for it. 
For the past year my friend (and mentor) Dave, has been adding on to his Mancave studio, to have an indoor shooting area rather than shooting outside. And like the rest of studio, it 1880's themed. 
So on Thursday I met up with Nick & Dave and my dad came along and we did a soft run through of the studio and testing out the 7 month old collodion we had.
Now, most of plates from Thursday involve Daves cat, LB (a.k.a Lover Boy). Once I saw him falling asleep on the chair I couldn't resist!
All of my 5x7 plates were taken using my Voigtlander lens. 
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Couldn't resist doing a crop of this place because I felt impressed on the sharpness of this plate! 

The Full Plates below were shot with a Dallmeyer 3A lens, using Daves rolling studio camera. 

​Towards the end of the day we started getting artifacts on the plate as soon as we fixed them (using KCN). I'm still not sure of the cause. You can it in the last two plates. 

After months of not doing wet plate and not practicing my pouring skills at all, I was worried that I was losing my edge with the process, but now that I started again I feel a bit better about my pouring abilities. Even Dave got to do some tintypes to! 

Fun fact! See the curtains that are hanging up against the wall? They belonged to Alfred Cheney Johnston! Dave started collecting some of his studio belongings years and ago, and now that the posing part of the studio is next to complete, my mum and I got the task to re-sew some of the fabric lining together and fixing some holes. 

Hey guys! For my final this semester I did 4 clear glass ambrotypes. I decided to play off an old idea I had before with the idea that beauty can blind us from what we do not see ( shot HERE ). The original concept was to do ghostly victorian images, but due to a time crunch and bad windy weather I did just some normal poses and ideas playing around with my butterfly mask. 

One of my best friends, Priscilla ( who is also an amazing photographer! You can see her work HERE ) was nice enough to model for me, and she did a wonderful job for putting up with my backdrop trying to sail away and looking after my camera while I was in the darkroom. 

Hey guys! I'm here to share my latest tintype session that I did yesterday! 
First off, let me explain the title of this blog post. If you live in the San Diego area, you already  know how HOT it has been and how very windy it has been. I prepared for the weather and not the wind. During set up I experienced watching my darkroom ( which had a dip tank and a bucket of water) float right off the table. Not going to lie, it was almost a disaster. Luckily no chemicals were in my dip tanks and nothing was damaged. 

Yesterday I has the pleasure of photographing Brian and Valentine  for their anniversary.  Valentine is also a local artist that does painting, to silk screening, to letter press! I felt very honored. 

Even though it was windy in San Diego, we managed to get some pretty clean plates done! Very pleased on how the session turned out. 

Luckily the backdrop or camera blew over for the rest of the day! 

Till next time! 

As of lately, my studio has been under construction. For the longest time I have been wanting to build my own workbench to put my soon-to-be portable darkroom ( Thanks Nick! ) and to have a space to be able to work and store some tintypes that don't have a home yet. Building something this large is new to me, I may have some handle on tools, but not all. Overall, I'm excited to finish this and design how I want it to look in the end! So far it just took this weekend to complete this much.