I have been looking at Opalotypes recently and I was interested in giving it a go. Basically, an Opalotype is a silver image made on a white surface (instead of your usual black). One of the ways to make an opalotype is to use the Wet Plate Collodion process, which I have access to, unfortunately, I was fresh out of white surfaces to make an image onto.
As luck had it, my ‘white’ Samsung S3 smart phone was sitting on my desk in front of me, which got me thinking, “wouldn’t it be pretty cool to have an opalotype on the back of my phone?”
I recently brought my enlarger home from my darkroom and have been looking into how to incorporate the enlarger into my Wet Plate work and I was thinking of all my negatives and which one would look the best on the back of my phone, when an idea struck. What if I could put an image on my phone and project it through my enlarger onto the back cover of my phone? If I could project a digital image onto my phone, my options were endless. I decided, on an appropriate image, one of my feet splashed with silver nitrate. This image was selected in Lightroom and inverted in Photoshop
I made a test exposure of 5 mins and the collodion didn’t dry out, so I wet ahead and coated the back of my phone with collodion!
The finished Opalotype on the back of the Galaxy S3
The phone back scanned
Making a opalotype phone cover I have been looking at Opalotypes recently and I was interested in giving it a go. Basically, an Opalotype is a silver image made on a white surface (instead of your usual black).