Does anyone do their negatives on glass plates? If you do, do you use commercially available plates or do you coat your own? How do you develop them? If you buy them ready to go, what emulsions and formats are available? I'm interested in both 4x5 and 8x10.
Thanks, Chris
hi chris
i have never bought dry plates, and have only coated my own. i have only made and shot 4x5, and enlarged onto larger sheets. i do have a bunch of 5x7 and 8x10 plate holders and was planning on making some this summer. i use liquid light. it is a traditional silver bromide emulsion and i rate it at about asa 6 ( like paper ). luminos ( i think i spelled it right ) makes an emulsion that is much faster ( iso 100 or so ).
if you haven't been here:
http://www.alternativephotography.com/process_dryplate.html
there is infomation of coating your own, and information on the bible: silver gelatin.
good luck!
I think sally mann does this - but it's wet plate (collodion?)
I think there is a link on PBS somehwehre of her doing this.
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
PS - maybe some scientific supply house still has a stock of TMax plates...?
:-)
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
Yeah, Kodak discontinued its plate production (TMax) in 1999, but there might be a few left somewhere. There question is: where?
I'd personnally learn to coat my own with Liquid Light or a similar product. The link above is a good reference.
To the best of my knowledge, Slavich in Russia is the sole remaining manufacturer of photographic plates. Their main "western" outlet is Retrophotographic in the UK (www.retrophotographic.com), although they do not (yet) sell plates.
If there is enough interest, I hope they will start selling them! I would prefer the "European" sizes 9x12cm, 13x18cm and 18x24cm myself
There are a small number of folks who coat their own plates; this can be done, as suggested, using Liquid-Light type emulsions, or if you have time and patience, by concocting your own using 19th century dry-plate recipes.
Take a look here: http://albumen.stanford.edu/library/monographs/sunbeam/toc.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE></TITLE>
<META NAME="generator" CONTENT="txt2html v1.28">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Glass plates are still used by aficionados of home-made holograms. The
following article might be of some interest, although it does not
actually solve the question of finding new blank glass plates. Holograms can be considered to some extent as modern derivatives of Lippmann plates ; this was accessible to XIX-st century technology. Why couldn't it be accessible to XXI-st "home" technoloy ? ;-)
How to make AgBr hologram recording plates with primitive simplicity
http://www.holoworld.com/holo/worksheet.html
</BODY>
</HTML>
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks