Primarily because I stress about materials being discontinued, i think it would be good to dabble in some kind of homemade process. I read some stuff from Bostick and Sullivan that makes DIY gelatin emulsions seem reasonably achievable, if slow and blue-sensitive. Yet collodian seems more popular. Is this because collodian is really easier, or is it because it is conceptually further from silved gelatin which, after all, you can buy?
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
--A=B by Petkovšek et. al.
I did the same about 15 years ago and learned platinum/palladium for the same reasons. we have some really good materials and some excellent hybrid methods available. just do your art
sorry I did not directly answer your question
best, peter
Making dry plates with liquid emulsion (I've not made DIY) and Van Dyke Brown prints are both quite simple and easy. I don't think DIY dry plate emulsion would be much harder. I don't think ease has anything to do with wet plate collodion's popularity.
Cyanotype. There is an article in the New York Times today about the resurgence of cyanotype. Cheap, easy and fun.
I'm with Peter on this - as well you can add gum over
Originally Posted by peter schrager
I've read, fairly recently (within the past year) an extensive web site by a woman in Oregon who is making her own ISO 25 orthochromatic emulsion, coating on glass and film. The tonality seems very nice, though her material seems to be marred with what looks like "snow" -- randomly distributed white (in positive) dots that I presume come from overgrown halide crystals that self-fog or are much more sensitive than the overall run in a given batch; if that's the case, reversal processing should correct that issue, but I don't know that she's tried it. She's been able to get pretty consistent speed, and the dye for sensitizing to green is neither toxic nor costly (yellow food coloring!). I think we'll be able to count on making our own emulsion, at least to this level, for as long as we can get chemicals.
I make my developers from either instant coffee (unlikely to vanish, as there are seemingly a lot of caffeine addicts with no sense of taste or smell) and generic acetaminophen, pool chemicals, vitamin C powder, laundry soda, and drain opening lye (not all together; that's five different developers). Stop bath can be slightly diluted white distilled vinegar or plain water, and fixer can be made from another pool chemical.
Traditional cyanotype should remain accessible indefinitely, though I expect potassium dichromate (contrast additive) will eventually become hard to get; it's already almost inaccessible in the EU due to environmental laws. Ware's New Cyanotype is a little more exotic, but should still be possible on the long term, though it may get more expensive. Van Dyke Brown and salted paper are both easy, if more expensive than cyanotype, and as long as we can get dichromate, gum will be an option -- even tri-color gum, as long as we're willing to use digitally printed negatives (since homemade emulsion is unlikely ever to be fully panchromatic, because of the rarity and expense of the required dyes, color separation on homemade emulsion may remain impractical, though two-color Technicolor worked pretty well back in the 1930s).
If a contact print at arm's length is too small to see, you need a bigger camera. :D
If you buy all that together, you're bound to be arrested as a possible terrorist :-)
I'm sure that by the time our photography chemicals have been banned for environmental reasons, several products from your list will be gone as well.
After watching Bob Carnie's latest video I am sold on trying PP prints. Look for it.
Then I read a lot more, and found the obvious reason for all those water bathes.
Soon new Cone inks for the Epson 1430 and even I may be able to do it.
This is often repeated, even by EU residents, but unfortunately (or fortunately) the facts get in the way of a scare story: I could go to my 'puter right now and order dichromate in almost any quantity I like for immediate delivery without any questions asked.
I'm a private individual, not a company or a lab or a school or an anything else, and I live in the UK.
I just went down the path of doing DIY dry plate emulsion. It is fairly straightforward... if you can cook and you have a darkroom, then you can do this.
The trickiest part is controlling temperature accurately. What made it easy for me is that I have a PID controlled heated water bath that I had previously set up for developing slide film. If you can control temperature, then the next tricky part is getting the emulsion on the glass plate w/o defects. The technical challenges are part of the fun for me, so I don't consider them necessarily difficult.
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