100 Days….Day #1
…..not consecutive days…I’ve tried “365’s” before and never made it past a month….the photography starts to feel like work…and I get lazy..
The purpose of this “100 days of wetplate” (the full title) is to get better at the process. I would love to go to a workshop or two, but with Covid still pretty hot everywhere, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I want to be able to enjoy the workshop. So, for now, I’ll learn on my own, and with the help of “Instagram friends” who’ve reached out to offer tips.
The image above is from Day 1, Saturday, January 23, 2021. The technique that I really want improve is the making of collodion negatives. I’m quite lacking there. I have an idea of how it goes, but making negatives consistently has been a problem. This image was the first plate of the day and turned out to just be a bright ambrotype (an ambrotype is a positive image, with more exposure and different development, the image will appear as a negative. The advantage of negatives is that they can be contact printed.)
This was shot with the full power of my strobes, so in order to increase exposure I would need to fire the strobes several times. I did that for the second plate I shot on Saturday, but that plate had other problems and I didn’t keep it (the nice thing about shooting on glass is that when the image doesn’t work out, you just wipe it off and try again). My next step is to use a developer formulated for developing negatives. For Saturday’s attempts, I was using a diluted positive developer and that doesn’t yield the best results.
Yesterday, I mixed up some negative developer and will use that for the next attempts.