Matt Verity - wet plate collodion

Day 84 of Project Portrait. This one is a bit of a special day for me. I've been reading a lot about old photo techniques and how they generated these incredible looks and feels, but were abandoned for their complexity and use of dangerous chemicals like cyanide and mercury. One such technique is wet plate collodion. Photos taken via this process were known for the incredible levels of detail they created and the amazing colour palette that no other photographic process seemed to be able to recreate. Well, I’ve been quietly obsessed with these images and so I set out to try and create one myself, and this is it. Now, I have to disclose I couldn’t find the right chemicals and or the space to do it for real, so I’ve spent hours trying to learn how to do it in Photoshop. Some might say it’s cheating but for me the act of learning techniques that would previously be unavailable to me are all part of this project I embarked upon months ago. So I took a portrait I took of the lovely Matt Verity and turned it into a wet plate collodion version. It looks like he’s been painted in silver. I hope y'all like it as much as I did creating it.
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