Collodion process glass plate

Early photographic technique

The collodion process is an early photographic process.

Collodion process glass plate

The collodion process, mostly synonymous with the "collodion wet plate process", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field.

Collodion is normally used in its wet form, but it can also be used in its dry form, at the cost of greatly increased exposure time. The increased exposure time made the dry form unsuitable for the usual portraiture work of most professional photographers of the 19th century.

The use of the dry form was mostly confined to landscape photography and other special applications where minutes-long exposure times were tolerable.^[1]

History

Gustave Le Gray first theorized about the collodion process, publishing a method in 1850 that was "theoretical at best",^[2] but Frederick Scott Archer was cred