W.W.'s Digital Wet Plate Photography :: "Hey, Down Here!"

This is another one I shot using the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 Art Lens. I kind of wish it was f/1.2 just so it would give that much thinner of a DOF to lend to the realism of the wet plate look, but I can't complain. It certainly does the trick as is.

I'm also learning that true wet plate - or colloidal - photography is virtually devoid of grain. Because of how non-sensitive it is to light - as opposed to 35mm films that have film speeds and DSLRs that use ISO settings - and because of how large the medium that's being directly captured to, the clarity and "resolution" outpaces anything we use today in terms of grain. In fact, when scanning a real tintype image, the limiting factor is going to be the capture medium, such as a scanner or digital camera. The image in this post did have grain added to give it a "film" look, but I probably shouldn't have. By the time I was becoming privy to this information, I'd already produce this one and a handful of others. I'm going to play around a bit with images that don't have grain to see how it effects the perceived authenticity of them.