Ferrotype

Author	Unknown
Title	[Family portrait]
Date	1856-1890
Register	03263

The ferrotype was, in a way, a technical derivation of the ambrotype. Instead of using a glass plate as the medium for the chemical emulsion that captured the image and a black background under the plate to see the positive image, the ferrotype used an iron sheet covered with black Japanese varnish and sensitised with the wet collodion technique (later the dry collodion technique was used). The captured image of the ferrotype appeared as a positive due to the black varnish. This procedure, which was first described by Adolphe-Alexandre Martin in France in 1853, was easy, cheap and quick to do. The resulting photographs were highly resistant to rough handling. For all these reasons, the ferrotype was a very popular and widely used procedure, especially between 1860 and 1880. It was also the procedure preferred by many travelling photographers, since photographs could be taken and developed in a few minutes. It was the type of photograph that was most widely used in the first decades of photography, more than the ambrotype and the daguerreotype.

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