These first few plates were our first attempt in the homemade darkroom without Mr Brewer looking over our shoulder giving us advice. It didn't start off the best, I ended up getting some poultry feed calcium carbonate derived from limestone. This was an ebay error and am currently waiting for the real white stuff. Using the wrong cleaning agent definitely had an effect on the glass plates but at least we were getting some kind of image so not all bad!
This is our first attempt on tin plate. It was the end of the day so the light was constantly changing and making it pretty difficult to guess the exposure which up until now wasn't giving us too much trouble. I quite like the spookyness of this tin plate though, it could be a poster for a horror film or something.
Attempt No. 2
With these glass plates we opted to clean them with good old fashioned fairy liquid and buffing them clean. It definitely made a different in the way the collodion fixed to the plate and eventually we managed start solving where we were going wrong with each plate. Sometime the plates were not clean enough, sometimes light leaked when removing and replacing the dark slide. I always like the imperfections on the plates but after a while is become irritating and I feel the need to diagnose and fix the problems. Anyway these exposure came out pretty good and most of the plates were developed successfully.
Next week we are going to shoot some more plates, try and perfect our technique and exposure intuition!
Can't wait to get our dark box on the road then we can take the camera out and do some landscapes.
P.S NO EDITING HAS BEEN APPLIED TO THESE IMAGES, THEY HAVE JUST BEEN SCANNED AND UPLOADED
