Getting used to a 24x20" DIY wet plate camera

[AgNO3]

Good day folks

Just wanted to share the results of a funny evening.
A friend ask me to assist him with a selfie, shot with his DIY 24x24" wet plate camera. Here "reduced" to 24x20".
We´ve mixed "Old Workhorse" for this test and poured it over a cheap 2mm acrylic plate. Unfortunately, heat marks of my fingers during pouring caused several dry spots, where the collodion lost sensitivity. Right on the nose... but we were pretty pleased by this first shot, trying to get a human being in focus of that Voigtlaender Heliar 4.5/300 at >3:1. Stopped down to f8, 4000ws* did the job (*sort of, we believe one flash quit service during this shot). Details and resolution are pretty amazing.






We are still arguing, if I went out of focus in that head clamp for this 4:1 shot, when he placed me in front of the 4000ws grill, or if handling that intimidating format made him to rush the final fine focussing, before pulling the slide. Anyway, there are some shoe string sized facial hairs in focus....





Constructive critique is - as always - highly appreciated.

Cheers

[cowanw]

That is very very impressive.

[AgNO3]

That is very very impressive.

Thanks.
We are still at the very beginning trouble shooting the format. Looking forward to shoot ambrotypes with it and to show more good and bad plates here in the future. Just as they come along

[ic-racer]

If it were easy, everyone would do it. Strong work!

[AgNO3]

If it were easy, everyone would do it. Strong work!

Thank you.
Well, it is actually pretty easy. The procees with film feels far more complicated and less flexible to me. The tricky part is, to perform all these easy steps flawlessly in the necessary order and given time.

The above presented mistakes could have been avoided by learning from the best and just shamlessly copying them right from the start. Ian Ruther for example uses a basket ball, to rest his huge plates on during collodion pouring for better handling. This certainly would have avoided heat marks on our image, too.
To not further rush the final fine focussing procedure, we just need to burn through a lot of plates, to get a feeling for the given time slot, defined by the rate of ether evaporation; it increases with the format size exponentially. Would have been pure luck, if we´d hit the sweet spot right from the start.