Nord In-Person Description

Join Jill Enfield in person at

Workshop: This workshop, which will run over 6 days, will transport you back to the beginning of photography and teach you to create glass negatives and tintypes using wet plate techniques from the 1860s, in addition to trying your hands on the Cyanotype process.

Our instructor Jill Enfield, has written two books about the topic and is regarded as one of America’s most experienced and respected alternative process artists.

The Cyanotype is a simple process that involves mixing chemicals, preparing the canvas, printing the cyanotype, processing and drying.

The collodion process is a bit more complicated. It is said to have been invented in about 1850, was the first widely used photographic process that produced a negative image on a transparent photographic medium. Other methods of the time, such as the Daguerreotype, produced a one-of-a-kind positive image, which could not be replicated easily. With the collodion process, however, the photographer could make an unlimited number of prints from a single negative.

The workshop will cover the entire process from cutting and preparing glass & aluminum, mixing and handling chemicals, safety procedures, making portable darkrooms, assessment of exposure time, evaluation of results, and all that goes into mastering the wet plate collodion process.

Jill will also give a lecture in how you prepare a digital negative to use in an alternative process. This way you can use any digital image you already have taken, and turn it into a wet plate collodion or a cyanotype image. You can also combind a digital print with an alternative process.

You need no prior experience in Alternative Process to join this class. The workshop is also open for participants who have experience in the Wet Plate Collodion Process, and wants to join us for a week to practise their skills, with Jill as their mentor.

We will have cameras on loan for our students, but we suggest to bring your own, to get experience with a camera you can use after the workshop. Old cameras, which we will be using, have different 'personalities', and might take a while to get control over. For camera suggestion, the Kodak Brownie Camera (large size) suits this process very well. Large format cameras are also well-suited. E-bay is a good resource for Kodak Brownie Cameras.

Dates: June 5th-June 11th 2023