The best way to imitate the look of wet plate collodion

[Mark Sawyer]

Not quite - Ortho is yellow, but not red sensitized, back in the days it was "true colour" (orthochromatic) compared to the preceding unsensitized plates. It could be described as having a green filter built in, so you'd still need that blue filter. For blue sensitive only you'd have to use X-ray film or unsensitized process film (now rare, but there used to be some, recognizable by the fly sheet allowing yellow as well as red safe light). Or traditional - not multicontrast - print paper.

Kodak makes (or made until recently, I don't keep up), five films that should meet the OP's needs. Two of them, Professional B/W Duplicating film (SO-132), and Professional Copy Film are listed as "Ortho". The other three, Eastman Fine Grain Release Positive (5302), Fine Grain Positive (7302), and Commercial Copy Film are listed as "Blue Sensitive". As the OP plans to use them, I doubt there would be much difference in the spectral-rendition results from ortho- compared to the blue-sensitive emulsions.

(See the "Special-Purpose Film" section of http://www.kodak.com/country/RU/ru/p...o3/O3wp2.shtml )

[David R Munson]

I've thought about this a lot, too, and for my purposes what I intend to try is (as someone suggested earlier) dry plate using liquid light or some other sort of liquid emulsion. Check out this link, which provides some good information about how to go about it and provides a few interesting examples. Once I have access to a darkroom again, I'll buy a couple of the Chamonix wet plate holders and set to work. Should be fun!

[davehyams]

For those of you willing to actually try the real thing, Dana Sullivan and I are teaching two workshops this summer at Bostick & Sullivan, in Santa Fe, NM. You won't even have to get silver nitrate on your own equipment!! Would be fun to meet some of the forum members in person, and flow some plates.