We attended the Little House On The Prairie 50th Anniversary Cast Reunion in Simi Valley with our Tintype Portrait Studio, Telegraph, and Magic Lantern. This was the busiest event we have ever done. We had Emily on the camera, Brandon and I worked the two darkrooms, and Shannon wrangled the crowd. Sarah worked the varnishing station. We also had a helper to work the candle dipping station.
Working the event
In general, we try to to do about 4 tintypes per hour. If I'm working alone, this would be moving quite fast. It takes about 4 minutes to create the plate, a couple minutes to take the photo and develop it, then about 15-20 minutes to dry and varnish the plate. It's probably 45 minutes to an hour end to end, but since a few can be drying at once 4 per hour is doable, especially if you have a separate person to help with darkroom. We were open from 10-4 for three days at this event so I expected we'd do 40-50 tintypes overall. We ended up doing over 100!
With the high volume, we had to adjust quite a bit along the way. The first day was overwhelming, we had already done 25 tintypes and we had turned many people away. We could tell we were going to be busy and going faster, requires more people so we had the whole family involved. We broke the work into 4 different roles.
- Wrangling the crowd - Greeting people, making appointments,
- Darkroom - Sensitizing and developing plates up to the Fixer.
- Camera - Posing people and taking the actual photos (the quickest part)
- Varnishing - Rinsing, Drying, and Varnishing.
Wrangling the crowd.
We started out with taking appointments at our regular "4 per hour" cadence. We quickly found that this wasn't going to work as all the slots were filled within a couple hours. We also found that people were not showing up for their appointments and we were turning away crowds of people that had come to the booth. Appointments were not going to be reasonable for this kind of volume.
We ended up doing what we called "restaurant style" Folks came up, put their name on the list, and we took them "first come first served". Folks could see where they were on the list and see the rate they were moving. We took names and phone numbers of all the customers so we could call them if they walked away. This worked quite well and we were able to do over 100 portraits!!
Darkroom
Besides drying, the part of the wet plate process that takes the longest is sensitizing the plate. The silver bath can only have one plate in it and it needs to be in there for three minutes. Loading the plate in the carrier takes full time attention from the person in the darkroom so it totally consumes the darkroom and eats up about 5 minutes total per plate. Going faster means two darkrooms so we had both of our darkrooms going.
Brandon mostly worked the darkroom and did the majority of the development.
Camera
Actually taking the photo is the quickest part of the process. Emily worked the camera. We took photos in the shade and used some local trees as the background.
Varnishing
This was the first event where we had to make a dedicated varnishing station. Varnishing in the rain or in high humidity is very challenging. The high humidity can cause a textured, bubbly varnish and the only solution I have found to prevent this is to get the plates very hot before applying the varnish. To heat the plate, we used a large cast iron skillet. We put a can of Sterno on one side so there was a hot side and a "cool" side of the skillet. This worked amazingly well so we'll probably duplicate this setup at future events.
Sarah was in charge of varnishing. She'd take the plate from the rinse water, dry and heat it on the hot skillet, and then varnish.
We went through multiple bottles of ShellacVarnish. Shellac is our go-to varnish since it's easy to use
and is the most historic, but I keep a bottle of Sanderac in reserve and had to break that out.
Telegraph
We also had the telegraph at this event. It was quite popular with the kids.
Candle Dipping
When we have someone to staff it, we bring our candle dipping setup. It's popular with both kids and adults. We heat up colored wax and folks can dip a candle to make whatever colors they like.
Magic Lantern
Matt brought the Magic Lantern and set it up in the Cozy TV tent. Most of the time it was showing episodes of the show. Though, they took a half hour break so we could sneak in a show. Here was the setup.
The Storm!
We ended up needing to end early. A thunderstorm rolled in. Tents and tables started to blow over and it was no longer safe to be outside. In the end, it was a great event.
Results
We had a great event with lots of happy customers. It was quite challenging working at the fast pace. Adding all the gusts of wind and rain really added to the challenge, but it was overall a successful event.
Hope folks enjoyed hearing about the event!
