11g Silver Nitrate in 80ml Distilled H2O
10g Salt in 500ml of Distilled Water
PreWash salt bath

I used a very dilute Rapid Fix due to the lack of Sodium Thiosulphate. Maybe not a good idea but when needs must.

Paper was immersed in the salt solution for 5 minutes and then hung to dry. Coated with a cotton wool pad and one with a brush.

Contact printed with window light. Overcast at midday, North light. Exposures of 30 -40 minutes.

When wet they had this lovely warm red/brown colour.

When dry though its dark? brown but with less contrast.

This one though from a glass dry plate neg has a totally different tone.

It dried much greyer than the previous print. I wonder why?

The other prints are from old digital negs for cyanotype and Van Dyke Browns that I had in a drawer.

So a quick exercise to see if the chem theory etc was right. It all seems to work just need to do it properly next time.

I’d seen some 1/6th plate ambros in one of the display cases but they were way overpriced for my pocket, then this framed image caught my eye just outside the junk corner hanging high up on the wall.

I was unsure if it was a tintype or an ambrotype but I could tell it wasn’t a print. Only info about it was a sticky label by the seller titled ‘The Family”.

I’ll have that thank you very much. And as its turned out to be a half plate ambrotype I got myself yet another bargain.

The mat/mount is actually painted onto the glass, not seen that before, at first I just thought someone had popped in a modern white mount as it was that bright.

Then on seeing the reverse and that the original paper and nails were in place Steph could see it was actually painted.

Theres no trace of any text/inscription on the back which is shame.

The backing paper was pretty fragile and hanging off in places. We removed it to find the actual plate was still encased in its original backing and taped front including the gold recess. I wasn’t going to be taking it any further apart, so the main scanned mage isn’t as sharp as the actual plate
.

There were also quite a few dead bugs that look like common book lice.

The rear board was just a rough pine panel.

A grosgrain ribbon is still in place.

And its definately an ambrotype as you can see the velvet behind the clear sections of the image.

Really pleased I spotted this and even more pleased as its an ambrotype and I think quite an early one. A lovely family group portrait and pretty informal really. Steph seems to think they are related to John Sessions? There is a resemblance I suppose…. sort of.

Decided to see what the magnification/focal distance was on the Hunter Penrose camera with the Ross 17″ f4 lens.

Full bellows draw lets me have the subject 60cm from the front element. Depth of field is very very shallow but results in a 2:1 magnification. These little bottles are about 2 inches tall.

Usual lighting set up was 20 seconds at f4. I’d imagine head shots at this size are going to be quite something. I wonder who can be my first victim. Time to get that head brace sorted methinks.

And this is what all that crud in the bottom of the dev bottle does to a plate!

Whole plate ambrotype.

Exposures seems quite inconsistent. Where a 1/3rd of a stop can vary the result greatly. I don’t think it helped having two year old opened dev. I think I’ll be trying this in some Caffenol.

Also there seems to be some banding/striations along the paper which is a little odd.

From the Ilford website posted on a web forum this time last year….

“We have encountered technical problems coating the HARMAN DIRECT POSITIVE RC paper. The result of this is that we cannot release the product to end users and as a consequence the product is now out of stock. At this point, whilst our R&D team work on the problem, we are unable to advise when the product will become available.”

Results are all over the place but I still think theres something of use in this paper, especially as it seems to have similarities to wet plate. Not just in the slow iso but also it seems to be sensitive to blue/uv more than the rest of the light spectrum.

The main top image has been tweeked in Photoshop for my own vanity as I really like it.

I’ve heard of people pre flashing their paper due to high contrast results. These are straight shots with the Darlot Cone lens with the paper rated at ISO 6 ish. I actually used a light meter, what a novelty.

Devs all but exhausted but I’ll definately be shooting more of these especially as I have 5×7 inserts for my plate holders. Really like the soft tonal results.

My silver bath took a bit of a battering over the weekend and looks a tad muddy.

First I’d like to say a huge thank you to Alex Timmermans for organising such an excellent event, a big thank you to Mark Voce for the transport and thanks to everyone else for making it a great weekend.

I think almost everyone suffered problems with the ammount of light we had on the weekend. Usually for a Brit that means lack of light due to the continuous cloud that we sit under, but this weekend it was exceptionally bright in Holland. The ammount of UV caused some problems but more about that later.

In my group were fellow wet platers Mark Voce, Yassen Roussev, Sergey Sergeev and Veneta Zaharieva. Five people sharing a Quickfish Tent/Darkroom sounds like a recipe for disaster and you’d not be far wrong.

On Saturday we had some issues with fogging and over exposed plates. It was very weird as Mark seemed to be doing okay. We had a small table set up with three silver tanks, mine on the left, Sergey central and Mark to the right. The windows had been covered with thick red welding screens and had been tested in Marks studio.

Lets just say it was very very bright and with direct sunlight coming through the screen directly in front of my silver tank, each and every plate would get a good dose of UV. Hence every plate having some form of overexposure/fogging. We didn’t figure this out until late Sunday morning after a few hours of poor results. Mark on the other hand who was a couple of feet across the table produced some stunning plates. So the light fall off/direction must have been pretty short. I was a little concerned it was a problem with my silver bath after vloiling it back to powder a few days earlier but I had shot a successful test plate back home.

I finally figured out it was the red screen by sensitising a scrap plate and held my finger against it up against the window, heres the result… Frustrating or what? but I really like the plate.

Here are a selection of my fogged plates.
Group shot Wide Angle lens f16 8 seconds 5×7 ambrotype.

Kodak Box Brownie hand held f8 1 second tintype.

“Yassen” Darlot cone lens f4 2 seconds tintype.

“Veneta” Darlot cone lens f4 2 seconds tintype.

“Castro” Darlot cone lens f4 2 seconds acrylic. My favourite image and a shame it was fogged. This was shot on laminated acrylic, left in the sun it warped into a banana?

“Sandra” Darlot cone lens f4 4 seconds tintype. Last plate on Saturday, the sun had moved around the tent so fogging not so bad.

I also shot a couple of 35mm ambros but the high gusts of wind on Saturday afternoon soon sent them flying over the table to the floor. One was salvageable of Isabel. The problem with shooting hand held at f1.4 at 125th of a second is you can actually catch a blink in wet plate!

Also shooting mini plates was Gerald Figal from the USA. It was great to finally meet the man himself.

His microscopic slide wet plate set up is something to see! Genius!

And heres Sundays plates after solving the light problems…

Veneta on 1/4 plate black glass

Castro on 5×7 black glass

I tried to follow Castro’s plate with one of Veneta but only had the one piece of glass left, so each time I had to wipe it clean…. This came as a bit of a shock to some viewers as the first time I did it there was a gasp and cries of “Oh No!”

A mark near the eye!

Slightly out of focus!

Poor framing!

And my last attempt… I called it a day after this one.

Thanks Veneta for being so patient but you do have great eyes for wet plate.

I really didn’t shoot as many plates as I thought I would. I was quite happy to stand in the sunshine and chat with everyone. It was great fun and very informative seeing how everybody works and all the little tricks we have.

Roll on next year!

Oh, and Yassen your forgiven!

I’m in Eindhoven at the moment attending the Euro Collodion Weekend.

So heres a pic of all my Victorian plates that I’ve collected over the past couple of years. I’m surprised that there were so many to fill the table. And I only ever pay the bare minimum. Good old FeePay.

I’ll post up my WWPD image on my return to the UK on Tuesday.

Normally I’d just sun and filter my silver bath, and on the odd occasion I would put it on a darkroom heated plate for a few hours. What possessed my to boil it down I have no idea. The result was a pale yellow cinder toffee looking gloop. I was expecting pretty white silver nitrate crystals. Wish I had taken a picture now. I let it cool down and dissolved in distilled water. This ended in a milky yellow mixture.

A couple of hours sunning in the studio and it turned from yellow to dirty grey. And after 5 filtering sessions it was almost clear.

I shot this quick plate to see if it still worked or if I had had a very expensive experiment…

Its a quarter plate through the window to the abandoned yard next door to the mill. I love what the old glass pane has done to parts of the image.

I’ll filter again tomorrow after its settled overnight and re-test the SG.

Looks like its going to be fine…. Phew!

The studio and darkroom are now re-wired with new sockets and lighting.

Plumbing is all but sorted, there was a problem with water pressure, turned out the pipe cutting joint hadn’t cut through far enough and resulted in very poor flow. A few turns of a spanner and click the pipe cut through properly and now Its perfect.

Moved the 5×4 enlarger into the darkroom, I think the layout is going to be just fine for my needs.

All thats left to do is plumbing outside into the soil pipe, tomorrow, and a final clear up of some small jobs. Its taken a while but I’m getting there….

I think its great to have a card and a tintype of the same person. He even has the same suit on! So more than likely taken in the same sitting.

Great tintype.