Elizabeth – A wetplate workshop

I’ve not blogged a workshop for a while so heres one from this weekend.

Elizabeth had no darkroom experience but being a self confessed nerd, who has always had an interest in chemistry, she soon got the hang of it. 

As usual there were a variety of cameras and lenses to play with. Elizabeth got to grips with the sliding box camera, the Watson studio camera, a whole plate field camera and last but not least the Goerz camera that has been sitting on a shelf unused by wet plate hands… until now. 

Some of Elizabeth’s plates from Saturday. She wanted to concentrate on portraiture, so no still life this time, just plate after plate of me. The occasional plate of Elizabeth, where I focussed and removed the lens cap only. There’s only so many plates of me one can tolerate surely.

She had already purchased Quinn Jacobson’s collodion manual and had been studying that, I also introduced her to the Osterman and Coffer manuals for comparison.

In the wash 

Looking pretty pleased with herself, and rightly so, her collodion and varnishing techniques were really good from the start.

Varnishing – Sandarac, Shellac, acrylic and Wax… an opportunity to try all with pros and cons discussed. The milk was for the coffee though!

Yours truly with Elizabeth’s trademarked sharks fin dev pour faults… she soon rectified this.

Some of her later half plate tintypes.

She had invited her Dad along on the Sunday afternoon to sit for some Birthday plates.

And what cracking plates they were. Happy Birthday Brian.

Another in the wash, a half plate ambrotype.

  So, a very enjoyable weekend. It’s always a pleasure to see the smile on a new wet platers face.

I’m really looking forward to seeing Elizabeth’s progress now she’s been truly bitten by the wet plate bug.