The portrait of Duke and Tami Sheppard, whose musical act Pint & A Half is featured in this issue, was taken by Salida photographer Tim Brown exclusively for our cover using a historic photographic technique called a tintype.
A tintype, also known as a melainotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s.
Tintype portraits were at first usually made in a formal photographic studio, like daguerreotypes and other early types of photographs, but later they were most commonly made by photographers working in booths or the open air at fairs and carnivals, as well as by itinerant sidewalk photographers.
The tintype process saw the Civil War come and go, documenting the individual soldier and horrific battle scenes. It captured scenes from the Wild West, as it was easy to produce by itinerant photographers working out of covered wagons.
Salida Tintype Studios opened in November 2015 at 225 F Street in Salida, in the same location where a photography studio operated back in the early 1900s. Brown creates tintype portraits using the same technique and equipment from the 1860s. The Tintype Studio and Gallery are open daily.
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