Andrew the Panda

This project happened completely by accident.  I borrowed my wife’s stuffed panda, Andrew, as a test subject for wet-plate photos.  Andrew has black and white on him, making him handy for judging development of the wet-plates, and he will sit still for a photo as long as I need.  As I started working with models making tintypes, I would do a test shot of the model with Andrew; skin tones can vary on wet-plate, so Andrew gave me a standard reference.  Between my posting some of the test shots, and my wife posting behind-the-scenes shots of the models holding Andrew, he came to develop an audience of his own.  Some of the models really ran with the concept, so I started a project in progress, done across multiple photographic media.