Wet plate collodion is generally considered the hardest historical photographic process to master, and one of the most expensive to set up. You need a portable darkroom, ether-based chemistry, a silver bath, and the discipline to coat, sensitise, expose, and develop a plate within a 10-15 minute window while it is literally still wet.
What if there was a halfway house? What if you could get tintype aesthetics without the wet workflow?
That is exactly what Nejc from Zebra Dry Plates has set out to make. His Zebra dry plate tintypes are aluminium plates pre-coated with a standard photographic emulsion, that you load into a sheet film holder, expose like normal sheet film, then develop using a reversal process that produces a positive image on the aluminium.
The result: a tintype that looks like a wet plate, but comes in a box and sits patiently in your plate holder for as long as you need it. No wet chemistry to manage on the spot, no rush against drying time, no specialised studio setup.
I bought a pack, tried them with mixed results (I will be honest about the mistakes), and came away with respect for what Nejc is attempting and a real curiosity about doing it properly next time.
This is the first attempt. The second attempt is here, where I corrected what I had learned.
Quick note on disclosure
I bought these plates with my own money. Nejc did not send them to me for free. Nothing here is sponsored or obligated.
How the process works
The chemistry is interesting, although Nejc explains it better than I can on his Lost Light Art YouTube channel which is well worth a watch.
Broadly: the Zebra plate has a standard light-sensitive emulsion on an aluminium base. When you expose it in a camera and develop it normally, the bright bits of the scene become dark on the plate (a negative). That is not useful on aluminium, because you cannot project light through it to print.
So Nejc has worked out (or rediscovered) a reversal process that flips that negative into a positive directly on the plate. The trick is adding a chemical called ammonium thiocyanate to the developer. With the right ratios and timing, this produces white deposits where the dark areas of the negative would be, giving you a positive image directly on the aluminium.
The recommended developer is Kodak HC-110. You add the ammonium thiocyanate yourself to the working solution. Zebra provides instructions but does not include the thiocyanate in the kit.
The ammonium thiocyanate problem
Here is the practical headache.
In the UK, ammonium thiocyanate is restricted. It is on a list of chemicals that suppliers will only sell to schools, colleges, and institutional buyers with documented reasons for needing them. As a private individual you cannot order it.
This is not an enormous restriction (there are workarounds) but it is a barrier worth knowing about before you order the plates. A few notes:
- James Lane from Zone Imaging recommended a couple of European suppliers when I asked
- A supplier in Germany sold it to me without issue (the EU restrictions are different)
- Nejc himself has since started selling ammonium thiocyanate through the Zebra Dry Plates website, which solves the problem if you are ordering from him anyway
So if you are starting from scratch: buy the plates and the thiocyanate together from Zebra. Saves the hassle.
I ended up with thiocyanate from two sources because I had ordered from Germany before Nejc started selling it. As I said in the video, I now have ammonium thiocyanate coming out of my ears. I am set for a while.
The first attempts (all failures)
Before I went out for the proper shoot, I tested these on my kids in my home setup. Three attempts, three completely fogged plates. No image at all, just uniform dark fog across the aluminium.
After some thinking, I worked out what was happening: my safelight is not actually safe for these plates. It is a red light that works fine for normal printing paper, but the Zebra dry plates are evidently more sensitive than I had assumed, and develop-by-inspection under my “safelight” was fogging the plates as they developed.
This is a meaningful piece of advice for anyone trying this process for the first time: do not assume your safelight is safe. Test it first. Better yet, develop in complete darkness until the image is established, then risk a quick safelight check only if you have to.
I had a pack of ten plates and had blown three on home tests. I did not want to do more testing because the plates are not cheap and I felt I knew what had gone wrong. I decided to head out and shoot anyway, knowing I might screw up the rest. This was probably reckless but it is what I did.
The shoot at Winterbourne duck ponds
I took the Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 with the Emil Busch Aplanat half-plate lens down to Winterbourne duck ponds with my friend Marsha, who had agreed to sit very still for me. The weather forecast said rain within an hour, so we were on the clock.
I brought five plates with me (the remaining stock from my pack of ten after the failed home tests).
Plate 1: complete loading failure. The plate came out of the holder still inside the film bag. I had not loaded it properly. Wasted plate, but at least now I had a sacrificial plate to learn loading on (one silver lining: I now understand the loading mechanism much better).
Plates 2-5: shot of Marsha at the duck pond. Various exposures from 2 seconds to about 2.5 seconds at the recommended aperture, in changing light as the sun popped in and out.
The exposures themselves felt OK. Marsha held very still. The shutter timings were as the meter suggested. The framing was good. We did portrait orientation, landscape orientation, environmental shots with the duck pond as background, and close-up head-and-shoulders.
![PLACEHOLDER: the shoot setup at Winterbourne duck ponds, showing the Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 on tripod with Marsha posed on the bag]
The development
Back home, I developed with HC-110 + ammonium thiocyanate as Nejc recommends. In complete darkness this time, having learned from the home tests.
The results came up. Four plates with usable images on them, one with the loading failure marked clearly.
They are interesting, but they are not what I expected.
What the plates actually look like
Here is the bit worth being honest about.
I had expected the dry plate tintypes to have a wow factor in the hand. I had built up an idea, partly from photos of wet plate work, that you would hold these aluminium plates and they would shimmer and surprise you.
In reality: they are dull. Not in the negative sense, but in the literal sense: low surface reflectivity, low contrast, hard to see in normal room lighting. To get the images to look impressive I had to put the plates on a copy stand with proper studio lights and photograph them from the right angle. Hand someone a plate in normal light and they will probably not be that impressed.
I should caveat this. I have never seen wet plate collodion done in person. I do not know whether wet plates also look dull in the hand and only come alive under specific lighting. It is possible. If that is the case, my expectations were unrealistic and the dry plates are doing exactly what they should do.
It is also possible (likely) that my exposures were not optimal and that better-exposed plates would have more visual presence. I will know more after the second attempt.
I should not blame the medium for what might be operator error.
![PLACEHOLDER: one of the four exposed plates on a copy stand with proper lighting, showing the kind of tintype look the process produces when shown well]
The latitude issue (which is genuinely a thing)
One observation that I am more confident about: the Zebra dry plate emulsion has no latitude for overexposure.
In one of the plates, where Marsha was positioned with bright sky behind her, the sky has blown out completely and come out as a very different colour to the rest of the plate. Not just bright, but visibly different in tone, as if the emulsion has reacted differently when overexposed.
The lesson: expose carefully and avoid bright backgrounds. This emulsion is not going to handle high-contrast scenes the way conventional film does. Compositions need to be planned for relatively even tonality, with the main subject lit but not surrounded by significantly brighter areas.
This is consistent with what I have heard about wet plate collodion (also notoriously narrow dynamic range), so it tracks with the comparable process.
Verdict from the first attempt
Mixed. Honest mixed.
What works:
- The chemistry does what Nejc says it does (reversal positive on aluminium, real images)
- The dry workflow is significantly easier than wet plate
- The price (£5 per plate) is roughly half of what equivalent wet plate costs once you factor in setup
- The reusable plate holders mean you can shoot, swap, shoot again without on-the-spot wet chemistry
- Nejc is genuinely innovating, and dry plate tintypes did not exist as a commercial product before he made them
What did not work for me first time:
- My safelight fogged the home test plates (operator error)
- I lost one plate to a loading failure (operator error)
- My exposures may not have been optimal (operator error)
- The visual presence of the finished plates is less than I had imagined (expectation error)
What I am genuinely uncertain about:
- Whether the plates would be more impressive if better exposed
- How they actually compare to wet plate in the hand (since I have not seen wet plate in person)
- Whether the latitude issues are fundamental to the process or fixable with technique
I will know more after the second attempt, where I corrected for what I learned.
Where to buy and try
The plates and the chemistry are at Zebra Dry Plates. Nejc’s Lost Light Art YouTube channel has detailed coverage of the process from someone who actually knows what he is doing (unlike me on the first attempt).
The plates are sold in packs of ten. Cost per plate is roughly £5 plus the chemistry costs. Significantly cheaper than wet plate collodion all-in, including the studio infrastructure wet plate demands.
Big thanks to Nejc for innovating in this space. The film photography world needs people like him, working on genuinely new products and processes, rather than just trading the same vintage cameras between collectors. Dry plate tintypes did not exist as a commercial product before Zebra. That is a real contribution.
Big thanks also to Marsha for sitting through a process I had not yet figured out how to do properly. She was patient, she held very still, and she deserved better than my first attempt gave her.
Finally, if you want to see the Zebra dry plates done by someone who has worked out what they are doing, watch Nejc’s own content. If you want to see me figure it out (eventually), the follow-up article is where I tried again.
And a quick note: the Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 that I keep using for these large format experiments is, as I always say, the best large format camera in the whole world ever ever. I am only slightly joking.