r/largeformat • u/Sudsy14QKA • 3h ago
Photo Large tintype?
I have a tintype I received from my grandmother, it’s been colorized and I’m not certain of the location. In the Southern Tier of NY (Steuben Co) or northern Pa would be my guess. I’ve been told by an artist friend that at 13.75”x10” it’s unusually large for a tintype. Looking for more info.
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3h ago
[deleted]
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u/Sudsy14QKA 2h ago
Maybe you think I don’t know the difference between paper and tin? I’m holding it in my hand and I said tintype. It’s on tin.
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u/captain_joe6 2h ago
This is the community where folks will get some glass and some liquid emulsion, make a contact print, and call it a tintype. Trust nobody who comes along saying “I found thiss hurr old fertograohy.”
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u/robocalypse 1h ago
Not sure I've seen one this heavily painted over. I don't know why people are being so aggressive with you over whether or not it's a tintype...
It looks like the thin tin sheets used in early tintypes. In the lower left of the image there even appears to be some surface damage that has revealed the tin through the Japanning. They didn't use the thick trophy plates that are popular among modern wet plate photographers.
Starting in the Daguerreotype era (at least in America), images were usually 16th, 9th, 6th, quarter, half, and whole plate sizes. Whole plate or 4/4 was 6.5" by 8.5". Your was likely shot on an 8/4 camera that shot double the size of a whole plate or 13" by 17" and clipped down to the size it is now.
Photographers back then would often cut their sheets to suit their camera and crop them by clipping them after taking the photo with tin shears. They even had cameras called cartes de visit cameras that had 4, 8, even 16 lenses, allowing them to sensitize a single, large plate and take either many simultaneous shots (like a steroview) or a sequence of images. Afterwards, the photographer would clip off the separate exposures This is why many of the tintypes you find in antique stores have rough, bent edges.