Lynne took a wet plate workshop maybe two years ago. Her chemicals have sat dormant for a long while and she was now in a position to start shooting again. She asked me along to her home studio to look over her workflow, darkroom setup and see if any of her chems were useable.
Lynne has a fantastic studio/darkr0om space at the bottom of her garden, basically a very large wooden shed, its a wonderful creative space.
After seeing her work through a few plates, only a couple of issues needed to be ironed out. Silver bath maintenance, length of sensitisation, exposure times and dev flow. As expected her chems were still useable if not providing the best quality images on her plates. So low sensitivity and very high contrast! but still, these chems are great for practicing flowing collodion and developing with a clean sweep.
It was also an opportunity to try out different cameras and plate holders to make sure they were fit for purpose.
Heres one of her recent problematic plates?!
A cold March weekend we soon moved indoors for a more controlled setting….
…. although photographing a Greyhound on wet plate wouldn’t be the most obvious subject!
I’m not a dog person but this one was pretty cool.
A 1 minute exposure. I’ll see if Lynne can send me a scan.
Thanks for your hospitality Lynne and Sarah.
I hope I was of some help Lynne and that you are now back on track, looking forward to seeing what you get up to.