Hello, Friends—
I am a university professor currently working on a book about the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, whom some of you may recognize as he was a key photographer of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). I have in the past benefitted tremendously from the combined wisdom of this forum and I hope I might again draw upon this community's knowledge of some of the finer points of older photographic processes to answer a question I have about an essay this photographer wrote for an amateur photography magazine in the early 1920s. In the piece, he was offering pointers about how to take good photographs of flowers and the problems that happen when you photograph in different lighting conditions.
Specifically, I'm trying to decipher what "hard plates" means in the sentence "In most situations, you have to contend with harsh lights and deep shadows, and you can expect hard plates." My understanding is that with these older developing processes, thickness or thinness refer to light’s ability to pass through the plate, not the physical bulk of the negative itself. Underexposure and underdevelopment produce “thin” negatives, which are more translucent, while overexposure and overdevelopment generate more opaque or “thick” ones. Is this accurate, and if so, in this context, is "hard" simply another word for "thick" or is there more to it?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer!
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