I'm a virtuous person. My first foray into Wet Plates came over 2 years ago during an exhibition of alternative photographs displayed at the 23 Sandy Gallery at a show called Resurrection. There I got my first view of actual Wet Plates, both on glass and tin. Totally amazed at the final image, the resolution was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I had at about the same time decided to start shooting film with a large format camera as well...
A few months later, I had gotten together with Ray Bidegain, who showed me the process and allowed me to take a wet plate photo. Totally hooked, but without time or finances to get my own wet plate photography off the ground, I did all I could and learned what I could on the internet. I was also cursing Polaroid because of their decision to halt production of Type 55 film.
Fast forward to early March of this year. I had read about Wet Plate Day, May 1st to honor Frederick Scott Archer, the founder of the Wet Plate Collodion Process. I contacted Ray to see if he was going to participate and if so, if he had any room for me to be able to shoot a few plates of my own, with his help of course. I managed to take 3 plates home, 2 for me and one for my model. We were all pleased.
Shortly after that, I was able to go ahead and purchase a kit where I would be doing some remedial mixing of chemicals to do my own plates. Last week, I spent a good 3 hours shooting and coming up with seriously horrible looking plates. Without anyone to guide me, I called it a day and felt totally defeated...
Portland has not had summer, even though we are beyond mid June. Clear sunny days has been a rarity, which has halted my pursuance of the elusive wet plate... Finally, today we had the sun coming in and out, but I was getting consistent light at my out door North Light studio.
My session began with hopeful thoughts of creating my first legible Wet Plate, but without luck, I merely picked up where I left off last week. Feeling defeated, I took a break and looked at the trash I created... I realized that was unintentionally fogging my plates and the most important step of putting the Silver Nitrate on the collodion and plate. A simple cardboard over my tray fixed that problem and I made a huge step forward! I still was having exposure problems and what was in my brain was not coming out on plate. Feeling hopeful again, I went against my better judgment and guessed at another exposure. My pour of the Collodion wasn't perfect, but usable. I felt so close I was not about to start over again. I'm still not a good judge of when to stop development. As I cleared the developer off the plate, I'm still not feeling good. Only when the images clears in the fix did I realize I finally reached my forbidden fruit.
About being virtuous... Patience...
1 comment:
mmmmmm.........yummy!!
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