In my studio, many people come to have wet plate portraits made to mark important moments in their lives—weddings, anniversaries, and the birth of a child. Newly married couples.Couples celebrating their wedding anniversary.Families welcoming a newborn. After the session, when I ask, “Why did you choose wet plate photography?”, I often hear a simple answer: “I wanted something that would remain in a physical form.” Today, most photographs are taken with digital cameras or sma

Today, I would like to write about some of the people who have come to my studio to have their portraits taken using the wet plate process. We live in a time when anyone can easily take photographs with a smartphone. And yet, there are people who deliberately choose wet plate photography, here in Tokyo. Many are couples in their thirties, including newlyweds and those who choose wet plate photography for their pre-wedding portraits. Some are from Japan, while others have come

Wet plate photography has two forms: positive and negative.When you search for wet plate photography, you may see glass photographs (ambrotypes), tintypes, or old paper prints such as albumen prints.All of them are wet plate photographs, yet they look quite different, which can sometimes be confusing. In fact, wet plate photography can be broadly divided into two categories: wet plate positives and wet plate negatives. Simply knowing this distinction can change the way you se

Why It Can Only Be Made While the Plate Is Still Wet In this article, I will be talking about wet plate photography, specifically ambrotypes and tintypes. When I explain the wet plate process to people who come to my studio for a shoot, I’m often told,“So it’s a one-shot process, right?” That’s true.But not because it’s meant to heighten tension, or because of some romanticized mindset.Wet plate photography is structurally a one-shot process. The nature of its workflow and it

Ambrotype and tintype When people see an ambrotype or tintype for the first time, many might think, "Hmm, this photo looks a bit dark."...

One of the unique appeals of wet plate photography is its visual impact—something you don’t quite encounter in smartphone images or even...

How a Wet Plate Photograph Captures a Changing Era Recently, I came across an old glass photograph.It was tucked inside a paulownia wood...

Why Are There So Few Photos That Truly Stay With Us? These days, we take countless photos with our smartphones. A trip might result in...

What “Silver-Salt Photography” Means in Japanese In Japanese, we have a special term — “ginen-shashin (銀塩写真) — which literally means “silver-salt photography.” It refers to all analog photographic processes that record images using silver halides — from film photography to the early wet plate collodion method. Interestingly, this expression doesn’t really exist in English. People usually just say film photography or silver-based photography .But the Japanese term “silver-sal

In this age of smartphones, why bother with wet plate photography? Nowadays, anyone can easily take photos with their smartphone. The...

Wet plate photography is a photographic technique that emerged in the mid-19th century, where images are captured directly onto glass...

The story of photography in Japan begins in 1848, when the daguerreotype—the world’s first practical photographic process—arrived in Nagasaki from the Netherlands.Invented by Louis Daguerre in France, the daguerreotype used a silver-plated copper sheet sensitized with iodine vapor. The plate was exposed in a camera, developed with mercury vapor, and fixed in a sodium thiosulfate solution, known as hypo. When the French government released the process to the public in 1839, eq

Coating with Iodized Collodion Plain collodion is a transparent solution made primarily of nitrocellulose, diethyl ether, and alcohol. When salts such as iodides or bromides are added, it becomes iodized (or salted) collodion.
 The process begins by pouring this iodized collodion onto a glass or metal plate. On its own, the collodion is not light-sensitive. Sensitivity arises in the next step, when it reacts with silver nitrate to form light-sensitive silver halides. *Various