Back to Front and Upside Down: How a Tintype Sees You
Upside down, back to front world
Every tintype I make is a mirror image. If you part your hair on the left, it'll be on the right in the plate. Same with a pocket, a brooch, a tattoo on your arm. Any writing in the shot comes out backwards too, which catches people out when there's a shop sign behind them or a name on the side of a car.
I get asked now and then if I've done something wrong. No. That's just the process.
Tintype - No negative
When you shoot film or a glass negative, the camera makes a negative and the print gets made from that. The second step turns the picture the right way round again.
A tintype never gets that second step. The image forms on the actual plate inside the camera, and that plate is what you walk out with. Nothing gets flipped in between. What you're holding is exactly what the lens put on the metal, left and right swapped.
Your face, but not quite
People are often surprised that they like how they look in a tintype. I think part of it is that it's the face they see in the bathroom mirror every morning. Your friends see you the other way round.
It's not exactly the face you know, though. Collodion doesn't see colour like we do, or like a digital camera does. It's mostly sensitive to blue and UV light and close to blind to red. So blue eyes come out pale, almost glassy, red lipstick goes dark, freckles show up much more than you'd expect. I had a customer who after a portrait session was worried about the freckles and moles the process revealed. He ended up visiting the skin doctor for a further look into it. Some tattoos will practically disappear. (I wrote a whole post on that, The Vanishing Tattoo.)
So you get your mirror face, in a light your eyes can't actually see.
Billy the Kid
There's a well known tintype of Billy the Kid with his gun on his left hip. For years that was the proof he was left-handed. Then somebody looked at his rifle. On that Winchester the loading gate is on the right side, and in the photo it's on the left. The picture was reversed. He probably wasn't left-handed at all.
The soldiers knew
Photographers in the 1860s understood all this, and the careful ones worked around it. They'd get a soldier to move his bayonet scabbard and cap box over to the wrong side before the exposure, so when the plate flipped it, everything ended up where it should be. Which means a Civil War portrait that looks right was often a man dressed wrong.ut
Victory or Death signs where also fashioned backwards for photographs at that time.
Couldn't they fix it?
A modern camera will have a mirror built into it to show you the image the way the eye sees it before you take the photo. Back in the 1800’s some figured out that by putting a mirror or a prism in front of the lens they could flip this around. It cost them light, though, and made the exposures even longer, so most didn't bother. I don't either. The reversal is part of what makes the plate an original and not a copy.
What I see
Under the dark cloth it's even stranger. On the ground glass the whole scene is upside down as well as backwards. I compose every portrait with the person standing on their head.
So I'm always thinking a step ahead. If there's a sign in the background I either crop it out or decide I can live with it reading backwards. Wedding rings end up on the wrong hand, which matters when it's an anniversary plate. And light that falls from the left in the room will fall from the right on the plate, so I set up with that in mind.
You do get used to it. Fourteen years in, the upside-down picture on the glass is the one that looks normal to me.
Branded Lens
Come and sit
The studio's in Lambertville, NJ, upstairs at the People's Store, 28 North Union Street. Sittings are by appointment. I make every plate by hand while you wait, and you take the actual object home with you. During our session I can show you behind the camera and how I see you upside down and back to front!
Call 609.845.4811 or book on the site.
