\ufeffThis month we\u2019re going back to the early days of vintage photography with James Millar, founder of The Tintype Studio near Saxby. James specialises in the art and alchemy of tintype photography \u2013 also known as wet plate photography \u2013 for his authentic portraiture<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\ufeffBooof! At photographer James Millar\u2019s command, the studio lights fire and a snap of eye-fuzzying light illuminates the whole room. This isn\u2019t a typical photographic studio though, with all the latest fancy digital camera tech. James specialises in tintype photography, a deliciously analogue 19th century technique with a unique aesthetic that\u2019s evocative and beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s tricky to say how many people in Britain still retain the ability to make a tintype photograph, but James reckons there are perhaps five to 10 people at the most who can offer such images professionally, such is the niche nature of the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even film photographers are rare these days, let alone those working not with modern film, but with such venerable techniques. Here\u2019s a picture \u2013 pun intended \u2013 of the way photography is more commonly conducted in 2025. The photo-sharing website Flickr analysed across a whole year how images uploaded to their website were taken. Nearly 151m were taken on an iPhone. 133m were taken on a Canon camera; 82m on a Nikon; 43m on a Sony camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the most popular brand in the world, Canon sold 3.34m cameras in 2024 compared to the sale of 231m Apple iPhones in the same year. It\u2019s also reasonable to surmise that uploading photos to a photo- sharing website is more common for enthusiastic photographers with a \u2018proper\u2019 camera and that most people with a smartphone are capturing pictures for personal use, not for the purposes of uploading them to any site beyond their social network accounts. In Apple\u2019s latest iPhone promotion for its forthcoming 17th generation model, though, the company said that 8bn \u2018selfies\u2019 are taken on iPhones each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other words, by quite some margin, the iPhone is the world\u2019s most popular camera, and in favourable lighting conditions it isn\u2019t bad. But the power in our pocket to capture images has led to complacency about their value. Few of us do anything but leave our images to languish on a mobile device or in a folder, or to be seen briefly on social media before being buried by subsequent content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a former press photographer and newspaper editor himself, James acquiesces to the convenience, quality and sophistication of the modern cameras that professional photographers use, both for his editorial and portraiture purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He studied Fine Art Photography at Nottingham Trent University, before landing a job as photographer for the Nottingham Post, and remembers shooting on film and how the newspaper had its own in-house darkroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a particularly fast turnaround to develop sports pictures such as football images, and then getting the negatives scanned in time for the paper\u2019s twilight deadlines. Latterly, as a reporter, picture editor and newspaper editor, he witnessed the maturation of digital cameras.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whilst modern kit is undoubtedly convenient, those who seek James out for tintype portrait commissions (he receives two or three enquiries a day) or for his tuition (one or two day courses, ad hoc, typically sought by professional photographers) recognise the unique vintage look of tintype images. James\u2019s images are especially popular with couples celebrating their 10th wedding anniversaries, given that tin is the material associated with the milestone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Programmes like Bridgerton, Downton Abbey, and Peaky Blinders, and films like The Great Gatsby have all made a \u2018vaguely vintage\u2019 aesthetic fashionable, even if those examples span a rather broader period from the Regency era to the roaring 20s, by which time celluloid was ascendant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Too few of us display proper images in frames or albums these days, and too few of us value the skills of a professional photographer. That wasn\u2019t always the case, though, and this month we\u2019re returning to the dark ages of the dark room, before megapixels begat moustachioed Victorian men producing calotypes and collodions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re in the rural photographic studio of James in Saxby near Grantham, and it\u2019s a pretty fun place to be. Unashamedly vintage, builders\u2019 tea is served in a white and blue enamel mug, Bowie is pre-empting our contemplation of old versus new photographic techniques by singing about \u2018Ch-ch-changes\u2019 through an old hi-fi, and the building itself is also an old livestock shed repurposed with a dark room and a changing room for portraiture clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forget about developing film on a roll and printing onto photographic paper. That\u2019s much too modern. We\u2019re here to create tintype images, rendered in silver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, we\u2019ve about three minutes, whilst the silver nitrate is reacting with the collodion (cellulose, suspended in ether and alcohol) and creating our emulsion. That\u2019s just enough time for James to explain…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cExperiments with capturing images had been conducted since the early 1700s, when Johanne Heinrich Schulze used a light- sensitive slurry to capture an image. Thomas Wedgewood was still experimenting with the same process around a century later.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn 1826 Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e9pce was a little more successful, although the process was impractically slow, until his colleague Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype process. Rival Henry Fox Talbot also demonstrated his similar calotype process around the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFrom these early techniques the collodion process \u2013 as it became known \u2013 was refined and widely used until the early 20th century when film (first sold by George Eastman in 1895) and celluloid emulsions became more common, with colour then emerging from around the mid-20th-century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tintypes democratised the process of capturing an image, allowing the middle classes and eventually the working classes to capture their lives and their likenesses beyond portraiture, which had previously been the preserve of the wealthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Around the mid-19th-century, those hoping to sit for a portrait would find themselves in a studio producing tintype portraiture, of the type that I was about to sit for. Imagine, an actual image of you: not just a painting or a drawing, but your actual reflection, permanently committed to a metal plate. Back then it was magical and exciting, not something that we just take for granted today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ah… three minutes is up. Already, James has taken the protective film off a sheet of 8in x 10in aluminium, then coated it with collodion and placed it into a lightproof holder with silver nitrate, at which point it will become light-sensitive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The light-sensitive plate is more sensitive to the ultraviolet than infrared spectrum of light though, so, James can still get away with using a red light in the dark room to make it a little easier to see. He loads the plate into a light-proof cassette in between front and back dark slides. That whole plate can now be loaded into his camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
James is using a Gandolfi 10×8 camera, which is really a reproduction of earlier cameras from the mid-19th-century. It was actually made in the 1980s. Its lens has a focal length of 350mm which to most photographers would mean a long zoom, but it\u2019s actually a focal length approximating 50mm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
James also has a 150-year-old Kodak with lens made by Bausch & Lomb (the company today makes contact lenses), and he uses a J Lizars camera for 5×7 plates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat in front of the large-format camera to pose for an image and, having seen the process, we then swapped places and captured an image of James, developing the image in his darkroom under his instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tintype photography has a style that can be (poorly) emulated with a digital camera and a copy of Photoshop, but employing such a modern approach would leave the image lacking a certain inchoate quality. It is, James reckons, comparable to streaming music digitally versus listening on vinyl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou hear people talking about the pops and crackles of vinyl, the uniqueness and the tangible warmth which give it such charm, it\u2019s perfectly imperfect.\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTintype doesn\u2019t just result in a black and white image, it has a real contrast with deep beautiful shadows, and a silvery tone that\u2019s really distinctive. What\u2019s more, you\u2019ll always get some imperfections or anomalies, so each image really is unique.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In proud possession of my own portrait, it was time for the portrait subject to become the photographer. Having prepared my plate, I sat James in position and ensured he was in focus using a magnifying loupe and a brass dial to fine tune the position of the camera\u2019s bellows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The image appears upside down and back to front \u2013 which the pentaprism of modern cameras corrects. As for a shutter release button? Well, there\u2019s no shutter, so there\u2019s no shutter release. Instead, James uses… a bowler hat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not only is that rather quaint and in keeping with the look and feel of the studio, it\u2019s a better option than using removing a lens cap, which is a little clumsier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, the black felt inside the bowler hat keeps light out, and you can lift it up before lifting it away from the lens with a nice quick movement. Then, it\u2019s a case of manually firing the flash using James\u2019s very powerful and very bright 3kW strobes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The flash is modern concession, but a sensible one, because the intense blast of light is so powerful that ambient light becomes irrelevant and the resulting image is solely derived from the brief but powerful duration of the flash, not the duration to which ambient light is allowed to enter the lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without the flash, you\u2019d need a subject to sit perfectly still and you\u2019d rely solely on ambient light for your exposure, which would take anywhere from five to 15 seconds. That\u2019s why the subjects of vintage portraits never smile \u2013 instead they had to sit perfectly still and stony-faced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After reinserting the front plate, it was back into the darkroom to develop the image. The plate is firstly developed using ferrous sulphate, with a solution of alcohol and white vinegar as a restrainer, it is then placed in a fixing bath of sodium thiosulphate which is the magic part as the image transforms from a milky negative to a black and white picture. After a thorough rinsing, and when they\u2019re dry, it\u2019s also common to varnish the tintype with shellac for extra protection from fading, and to add a nice gloss \u2013 a preference for such a finish was continued when the film era emerged; you might remember being asked by the photolab if you wanted your photos \u2018matte or glossy?\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The images certainly last, too. Some of the early tintypes endure even 170 years later, which, James says, gives rise to the hope that a century and a half from now his images will still be in a frame or on the wall. That\u2019ll certainly confuse a future historian trying to accurately date an image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the tintype image was in the rinsing tray, there were a few minutes to admire the various commissions and portraits that James has produced in the studio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They\u2019re all subtly different but all really evocative, images from when photography was more about patience and less about casually taking snapshots for Instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe people I work with are seeking the look, the aesthetic, and they don\u2019t just \u2018accept\u2019 that it\u2019s a less consistent process than modern photography; they actively seek it out specifically for that reason.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m thrilled that there\u2019s still demand for the look and the skill,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s still slightly magical to me. Sure, with modern photo editing software you can emulate the look to a certain degree, but only artificially and only on a screen, the real joy is holding a real tintype in your hand, seeing the clarity and knowing you made it from scratch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA proper tintype will always have something extra, a quality you can\u2019t necessarily identify or put into words, but just a look and a feel that\u2019s absolutely unique and still very beautiful. In that respect, they\u2019re not just vintage; they\u2019re timeless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\ufeffJames established The Tintype Studio in 2020, and offers vintage portraiture from \u00a3400, plus one or two days workshops by arrangement \u00a3POA. See www.thetintypestudio.co.uk or call 07703 987532 for details.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n See our full feature in the November edition of Rutland Pride at https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland\/view-magazines?magazine=November-2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \ufeffThis month we\u2019re going back to the early days of vintage photography with James Millar, founder of The Tintype Studio…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1653,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[88,469,468,470],"class_list":["post-1652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heart-of-the-county","tag-photography","tag-tin-type","tag-tintype","tag-vintage"],"acf":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1658,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions\/1658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pridemagazines.co.uk\/rutland-and-stamford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}