For the last week I have been in Park City, UT for the Sundance Film Festival. I was part of a team of photographers, editors, and darkroom technicians that photographed nearly every cast to every film that made the Sundance Festival. More than that, we all worked to create a library of images of some of the biggest names attending Sundance. We were lead by photographer, Victoria Will who has worked at the festival each year since 2010 and does an amazing job directing talent and making this all come together.
After meticulously setting up our tiny little studio in the back of a repurposed ski shop on Main Street in Park City, we were bombarded with actors, directors, producers, and their entourages.
We shot digital images of all of these people which will be seen for years in newspapers, magazines, and all over the web but what I am most proud of, is the tin types we created of these people. A tin type is a photographic process that dates back to the 1800s and involves a lot of chemistry, loads of light, and patience (but not too much or it wont work). Basically, you take a piece of aluminum in the dark room and coat it with a substance called collodion and then placing it into a bath of silver nitrate which makes the metal plate photo sensitive. You then put the plate in a holder and place that into the camera. When you are ready to take the photo, you remove the dark slide, thus exposing the plate to light, pop the flash and bingo...you have an image on the plate.
Next, you take the plate through the darkroom processes and the best part is seeing what you captured. It's like magic!
One of the crazy things about this process is that we typically only got one shot to get it right and when your window to work with each actor or director is about 5 minutes, there is not much room for error.
Now for the good stuff...here is the link to Esquire who picked up many of the tin types so you can see the results of all of our hard work! I am pretty proud of what we accomplished so check it out!
