Heres an old ambrotype of a family at the seaside, its quite a common scene in Victorian imagery.
Whats different with this one is that the black paint layer has been added directly to the collodion side of the image, rather than being varnished and blacked on the reverse.
This has resulted in some blooming of growth of small brown blotches. In the past I had thought that painting the collodion directly would be an advantage as the viewed side would be just glass and not the varnished collodion side of the ambrotype. The plates I had done this to soon developed very similar staining. I wonder if thats why we don’t see so many painted this way?
