Collodion process

The collodion process is an early photographic process for the production of grayscale images. The collodion process – mostly synonymized with the term "wet-plate process", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field. Collodion is normally used in its wet form, but it can also be used in its dry form, at the cost of greatly increased exposure time.

The increased exposure time made the dry form unsuitable for the usual portraiture work of most professional photographers of the 19th century.
The use of the dry form was mostly confined to landscape photography and other special applications where exposure times sometimes longer than a half hour were tolerable.

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Source: Wikipedia · Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain