Flashbacks to the ’60s might be common for some flower children, but one Rochester photographer is using her flash to go back to the 1860s.

“It’s essentially the same process they used in the 1800s,” says Rochester-based photographer Emily Baron, describing the retro tintypes she creates.

The realization that her art form has such a lengthy history is something she describes as “kind of wild to think about.”

Tintypes, sometimes known as ferrotypes, are photographs produced on metal sheets. They were most popular in the 1860s but have made a resurgence in modern day photography as a fine art form.

Baron, who moved to Rochester in June 2022 because of family working at the Mayo Clinic, worked as a photographer previously in New York and North Carolina. She’s always loved photography but is particularly drawn to analog photography and enjoys experimenting and learning how things work.

“With tintypes,” she says, “you are literally making the photographic emulsion on a piece of metal, and I think that is so cool. It’s an amazing combination of art and science.”

Despite the current preponderance of digital photography, Baron says she’s always continued shooting with film. Baron explains that she likes how analog photography is tactile and methodical. “With digital you can shoot multiple frames a second, which is great for certain things,” she says, “but shooting film or tintypes forces you to slow down.”

Though largely self-taught as a photographer, Baron first learned the basics of working in a darkroom in a high school class and later attended a workshop on the wet plate process. She says most of what you need to know to be a successful photographer can be learned online.

Seeing a photographic image developing is something Baron describes as magical. “The darkroom allows you to take the image you took with the camera and turn it into the image you had in mind,” she says.

To create a tintype, Baron coats a 4” by 5” inch metal plate with chemicals to make it light sensitive. The chemicals involved include collodion and silver nitrate. She then puts the plate into a holder in her large format camera that is held on a sturdy tripod. The exposure time varies between seconds and minutes depending on how old the chemicals are and how much light is available.

Waiting patiently for the subject of the tintype to appear, Baron develops the exposed metal plate in the dark under a red light before she fixes it so it will no longer be light sensitive. Then, she varnishes the plate. While it only takes about 15 minutes to capture the image on a plate, the varnishing process she uses, which uses sandarac, takes about two weeks to dry.

The process requires gloves and eye protection. “Silver nitrate stains everything,” says Baron.

Baron’s love of the tactile nature of the sturdy metal photographs might be a reaction to the “clutter” created by the ease of taking photos in a digital age. “It’s so easy to snap a photo with your phone at any time,” she says, “but what happens to all these images? Most of them are never looked at again.”

With tintype photography, Baron says the photographer must be more considerate of the subject, the composition, and the lighting of a photograph. “It makes you think so much more about what you’re taking a photo of,” she says.

When Baron experiments with new lighting or tries out new chemicals, she often takes self-portraits. “I have more self-portraits than I care to admit,” she says, adding that her favorite tintypes are those she’s taken of friends and family. She also creates tintypes of still life scenes in her studio.

Baron says the tintypes’ lack of “film grain” and their sensitivity to ultra violet light gives them a unique image quality. The trade off for that quality is that the process includes a lot of technique that can potentially go wrong.

“Pouring the collodion takes some practice,” she says. “If you don’t pour it well, you’ll get all kind of weird artifacts on the final image. The process is very time-sensitive, too. Once you sensitize the plate, you only have a few minutes to take the image before it dries out.”

At the Lowertown Fest in Rochester this past August, Baron set up a mobile tintype stand right next to the dunk tank with a quilt hung as a portrait backdrop. She is just starting to make tintypes for events and festivals and is still working on perfecting her mobile set up.

“The process is so involved that it requires a lot of preparation,” she says, “and I’m still working out some kinks for tintypes on-the-go.”

She built a darkroom at her home and hopes to start teaching analog photography classes.

“My dream is to create a community darkroom where locals can develop and print and collaborate,” she says.

For Baron, the charm of making tintypes is linked to their permanence and physicality.

“Being able to create tintypes and having a one-of-a-kind, physical object you can hold is really something special,” she says.

To learn more about Emily Baron’s photography find her at

embryoh.com.

To find Emily Baron’s online photography shop, go to

littlecamerashop.com.