Many ambrotypes were made by unknown photographers, such as this American example of a small girl holding a flower, circa 1860. Because of their fragility ambrotypes were held in folding cases much like those used for daguerreotypes

"Erika" 2007, an 8"x10" Ambrotype on black glass (aka BGA, Black Glass Ambrotype)

The ambrotype process (from Greek ambrotos, "immortal") or amphitype is a photographic process that creates a positive photographic image on a sheet of glass using the wet plate collodion process. Photography (fә'tɒgrәfi or fә'tɑːgrәfi (from Greek φωτο and γραφία is the process and Art of recording pictures by means of capturing The collodion process is an early photographic process which was quickly replaced at the end of the 19th century with today's gelatin emulsion process The collodion process is an early photographic process which was quickly replaced at the end of the 19th century with today's gelatin emulsion process It was patented in 1854 by James Ambrose Cutting of Boston, in the United States. Year 1854 ( MDCCCLIV) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common year James Ambrose Cutting (1814-1867 was a 19th century American photographer and the inventor of the Ambrotype photographic process The wet plate collodion process was invented just a few years before that by Frederick Scott Archer, but Cutting used it as a positive, instead of a negative. For people named Fred Archer (including the unrelated 20th-century photographer see Fred Archer.

In Great Britain it was called collodion positive: one side of a very clean glass plate is covered with a thin layer of collodion, then dipped in a silver nitrate solution. See also Kingdom of Great Britain Great Britain (Breatainn Mhòr Prydain Fawr Breten Veur Graet Breetain is the larger of the two main islands Collodion is a solution of Nitrocellulose in ether or Acetone, sometimes with the addition of Alcohols Its generic name is pyroxylin solution The plate is exposed to the subject while still wet. (Exposure times vary from five to sixty seconds or more depending on the amount of available light. ) The plate is then developed and fixed. The resulting negative, when viewed by reflected light against a black background, appears to be a positive image: the clear areas look black, and the exposed, opaque areas appear light. This effect is achieved by coating one side of the glass negative with black varnish. Varnish is a transparent, hard protective finish or film primarily used in Wood finishing but also for other materials Either the emulsion side or the blank side can be covered with the varnish: when the blank side is blackened, the thickness of the glass adds a sense of depth to the image. In either case, another plate of glass is put over the fragile emulsion side to protect it, and the whole is mounted in a metal frame and kept in a protective case. In some instances the protective glass was cemented directly to the emulsion, generally with a balsam resin. Burseraceae is a moderately sized family of 17-18 genera and about 540 Species of Flowering plants The actual numbers differ according to the This protected the image well but tended to make it darker.

The ambrotype was much less expensive to produce than the daguerreotype, and it lacked the daguerreotype's shiny metallic surface, which some found unappealing. The daguerreotype (original French daguerréotype) is an early type of Photograph, developed by Louis Daguerre, in which the image is exposed directly By the late 1850s, the ambrotype was overtaking the daguerreotype in popularity; by the mid-1860s, the ambrotype itself was supplanted by the tintype and other processes. Tintype, also melainotype and ferrotype, is a Photographic process first described by Adolphe-Alexandre Martin in France in 1853 and patented

Ambrotypes were often hand-tinted. Untinted ambrotypes are grayish-white and have less contrast and brilliance than daguerreotypes.

External links

• Contemporary Ambrotypes from Quinn Jacobson
• Modern ambrotype images and how to make them
• The wetplate collodion process, used to make ambrotypes
• A brief history of the wet plate collodion photography