POV: Aluminum "Wet Plate" Test

Fail.

That's not what I expected.

I used the Polaroid Fotobar's Metal Art service to try to duplicate the look of wet plate collodion photograph, by choosing to have one of my photographs of Bhutan printed directly onto a 1/8 inch double bonded aluminum sheet. The intention was to emulate the look of a wet plate on a photograph processed using the Exposure 4 software, and was uploaded directly from my desktop to Polaroid.

I chose a square size of 12 x 12 inches for the photograph, which would fit nicely on a 1/8" double bonded aluminum sheet.

Sure enough, the metal print arrived within the time frame promised by Polaroid, however it was disappointing, and it didn't look as I expected it to be. 

Don't get me wrong. The quality of the product is fine. The photograph was well printed on a polished satin finish aluminum sheet, but it didn't look like a wet plate at all. It looked like a monochrome photograph printed on a metal sheet, without the sort of wet (or glossy) feel tin types usually seem to have have.

So it's back to the drawing board. Damn.