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Tintype photographer creates portraits Tom Burns looks over a tintype photo he captured and processed in his Medford apartment Wednesday. [Mail Tribune / Andy Atkinson] Monday Feb 26, 2018 at 3:03 PM Feb 26, 2018 at 3:03 PM Buffy Pollock for the Mail Tribune Born more than 120 years after his favorite type of photography was popular, Medford resident Tom Burns is out to share his appreciation for a slower type of portraiture. Burns, 28, launched Tintypes by Tom Burns last month. Created on thin sheets of iron using a collodion process, tintypes were commonplace during the 1860s and 1870s and deemed more durable and affordable than their glass predecessors. Tintypes would be exposed while the sensitized collodion on the metal was still wet and were processed immediately, thus producing an “instant” Civil War-era Polaroid of sorts. “You have a blank sheet of aluminum on which you pour a salted collodion mixture," Burns explains. "In a darkroom, the wet plate goes into a bath of silver nitrate, which combines with the collodion to become light-sensitive. The plate is then placed into a camera and the photo is exposed onto it." Always nostalgic about film and slide photography, Burns delved into researching the process about a year ago and was excited to try it. “I saw a video on YouTube about a photographer taking tintype portraits of a bunch of actors at the Sundance Film festival. The incredibly unique aesthetic of the photos and the whole process of creating the tintypes fascinated me. The darkroom, the chemicals, the large-format camera, the image being taken on a metal plate, I was enthralled,” he said. “I've been doing digital photography for about seven years, but I'd always been interested in older types of photography, like shooting film. I finally purchased all the equipment necessary for doing tintypes about a month ago and dove right in.” In an era where someone’s cellphone might snap hundreds of photos in any given day, Burns, who recently shot a tintype of his grandparents, prefers the quality and charisma of old film and slide images. Each metal image he creates, Burns says, feels like he’s produced something tangible that will be around for longer than photographer or subject. “I love how much longer it took to do everything before digital and how you could really capture an image on a tangible medium. I love how this makes you slow way down and treasure every picture so much more. In the old days you would get what you got and you loved it no matter what it looked like because that was all you had,” he said. Last week, Burns demonstrated his process for taking tintype photos during a brief window of sunlight during an icy week. Using a slightly modified Graflex Graphic View II from 1949, he used a trigger to snap a head shot of himself. After the few seconds' exposure, he headed to his makeshift darkroom to process the results and smiled as the image slowly appeared on the thin 4-by-5-inch metal sheet. Burns hopes to create a mobile darkroom and offer an array of head shots, family photos and even wedding portraits. He’ll be on hand Sundays at the Jacksonville Market beginning May 27, but he’s available on demand. The process is exactly the way it would have been done over 100 years ago, he says. “Aside from the camera being newer (1940), everything else about it is exactly how they would do it in the 1850s,” he says. “The little imperfections, gradients, every image is different. The uniqueness and colors make every image different. It explains the popularity of Instagram. I think people really love and miss these kind of photos. Every picture is totally unique.” Burns smiles at the notion of producing something that those of his grandparents' generation, and possibly his own, would find in an old box and immediately treasure. “It’s just a very unique aesthetic you can’t get with anything else. Obviously, you could do some Photoshop work to make a photo look the same as this, but you wouldn’t get that tangible piece of metal on which the photo was actually shot. It’s just something that could be around forever.” Online: www.facebook.com/tintypesbytom/. — Reach Medford freelance writer Buffy Pollock at [email protected].