Image courtesy Phil Nesmith

By midnight tonight, photographer Phil Nesmith needs to have raised $2,000 to fund his mission to the Gulf Coast. Once there, Nesmith will use a wet collodion photographic process (read: old-ass-looking photography) to document what he finds. With $2,000, he can haul his gear, his glass, and a portable darkroom there to make the images. But with 9 hours to go, Nesmith has already raised $3,370 — and now he’s on the road.

For that he can thank Kickstarter, a website he started using only nine days ago, and 62 of his closest friends — or people, anyway, who buy into what Nesmith has in mind.

Kickstarter is a sort of crowdsourced micro-finance hub for creative projects. Among Nesmith’s supporters, who each donated funds for the project via the website, are DCist photographer Chris Chen and (sometimes) D.C.-based artist Lily Cox-Richard; their names and profiles are listed under Nesmith’s project.

For as little as $5 (the price of a cup of coffee!), fans are able to tip into Nesmith’s hat and help him to finance (and now, extend) his photographic expedition to the Gulf Coast. Kickstarter doesn’t reveal what amount individual contributors give to specific projects. Right now, the contributions average out to about $50 per kick.

So what are they getting? Nesmith is partnering up with the “unconventional photography” magazine Diffusion to do an editorial spread on the consequences of the British Petroleum oil spill for Gulf Coast residents and for the Gulf Coast itself. Through Diffusion, Nesmith has the appropriate press credentials set forth by the Deepwater Horizon Incident Joint Information Center. (No easy feat, as Mac McClelland explains.)