Tintypes When Made?

I just fished through some old family pics and found a tintype of my paternal great,great grand.She has poofy sleeves. I can't believe how severe her hair is pulled back plus her mean look,looks like a man? ,LOL.My Mom was born in 1928, her Dad in 1889,so I do not know when his mom was born or his grandmother? When did they make tintypes?

 

Now I know where I got my beauty from,ROTF.

 

Tintypes began being produced in the late 1860s and were being made into the beginning of the 20th century. The sleeves and other aspects of her dress look like about 1896-1897 to me. Of course, older people sometimes wore clothing when it had already gone out of style, so it could be a little later.

I like the studio backdrop in the picture!

 

Hi Shilo,
This is not your gr gr grandma. It is your gr gr Uncle Silas who no one was supposed to talk about.
greg

 

Greg, I guess they had drag queens back in the day too.

 

Oh she was Irish so let the jokes begin.

 

Hi Shilo,
Here is one for ya.
greg

 

OMG! That is hilarious

She/he looks like the hairy ainu.

 

Hi Shilo,
It happens in all familes. My middle name was from two "uncles" who lived together for over 60 yrs. They were two bachelors that were roommates.
greg

 

No one knows when the first tintype was made, it was patented in 1856. They are basically the same as an Ambrotype (a collodion positive) on glass. Someone found that a slightly under exposed glass negative, when laid on a black background would show as a positive image, creating the ambrotype. This process explains the overall darkness of the images and the lack of contrast. (many unscrupulous dealers run the scans of tintypes through an image processer like phtotoshop to bump up the contrast and lighten the image)

To make a tintype they coated a thin sheet of iron with black enamel to act like the dark paper placed behind the Ambrotypes. These were inexpensive to make, and production required less steps and materials, so tintype photography was a cheap and easy way to get into the market. They were also some of the first photographs that most families of modest means could afford. They were very popular during the civil war, and itinerant photographers could pack up a whole studio on a cart and travel to rural communities, shoot and develop photos in a single day, and move on, making tintypes and traveling photographers symbolic with the wild west.

They continued to be made at amusement parks and boardwalks well into the 1920s, as a kind of instant photography, take your pic in the morning and come back for it in a few hours or minutes. The quality of these images wasn't always so good. Later carnival tintypes were made on celluloid sheets. The photo booth seems to have finally displaced them all together.

 

My Uncle was born in 1914 and had two sons, one born in 1935,that son we found out died from AIDS in 1980. He was Gay and my uncle being "old fashioned" actually accepted his orientation.