News — glass negative

One of the fun components of working with collodion based image making is the many variations it provides. By reading 19th century literature it is easy to determine that photographers made negatives, all other practitioners were called tintypists, daguerreotypists and ambrotypists. This is why some contemporary collodion based photographers will sometimes say, with tongue in cheek and intended humour: Real photographers make negatives. Hobbit's Garden, Salted Silver Print   Is it more challenging to make a negative?  Most definitely. Are the rewards greater? That depends. Enjoyment comes in many different forms – I enjoy the opportunity to try the many different printing techniques...

wet plate photography is little different than digital captures, or E6 and C41 processes. Collodion at its very core is little more than another tool within the photographer’s tool chest from which to communicate a predetermined message.

We’re new, and we’re having some fun. Well, we’re not really that new. The principal behind Antique Pictureology is me - Dale Wilson, and I have been working full time as a photographer for close to 30 years. I started like many others in this industry, shooting and working in a black and white darkroom for a community newspaper.  The smells of hypo and developer never leave the sensory, and the magic of watching an image mystically appear on a sheet of Ilford No.2 gloss (the only paper the newspaper would stock) leaves a lasting impression. After several years it...

In advance of getting my little online store up and running, it seems I spent more time fussing over names than anything else.  The look of the store, the products to carry, whether to charge in Canadian or US dollars, and a myriad of other considerations can all be amended with little long term implications. The name and brand, however, is quite another matter. In my last entry I gave a brief explanation of how we arrived at the “Antique Pictureology” name. Due to the background of how the name simply fell into my lap, it just felt right.   ...

It was in October, 2000 that I received a thank you letter from a young fan following a fund raising presentation in my Nova Scotia, Canada, hometown. My presentation partner, the highly respected and acclaimed landscape photographer, Daryl Benson, and I were able to raise sufficient funds that night to install new playground equipment at the elementary school. It was a letter from then six-year old Breanna that created the name for this store. She wrote: “Thank you very much for raising the money for the school. I love all the pictures you took. You are a great pictureologist!” That...