Flowers and Photograms: UCA collodion October 2018

Yes, another UCA collodion session. This one was carried over from last term as many people were busy with work placements, so we rescheduled it for October. Luckily we had a good sunny day. Even though we worked indoors we need that UV light.

I've not got a lot of new technical insights this time as our working practices on these sessions are getting more standardised. Using Lea's Landscape no. 7 collodion from Wet Plate Supplies and the beautiful fast 12" f/3.5 Taylor Hobson Cooke Portrait lens meant exposure times were short: around 4 seconds in the morning.
The pours were consistently very good: partly operator skill (well done everybody) and partly the collodion which seems to keep and flow better than the JB stuff we used to use. It does seem more susceptible to spotting from finger heat (there are various conflicting theories why the image darkens in patches above where the fingers supported the plate during pouring. whatever the reason, something definitely happens!) I'll try and do some tests sometime.

If anything we might have been over-exposing a bit. The images 'came up' a bit fast in development and there's a bit of excess silver here and there. Maybe my judgement was off; I've been busy with the new studio this summer and hadn't made a plate in quite a while. They do scan (and should print in the darkroom) well.

Here's the sequence for the first test:

Our usual setup in the corner of the finishing room. Note the marks on the dark slide for test strip exposures at different plate sizes. (thanks to Daryl Pallas for these colour photos)

The image as seen on the ground glass. It almost makes me wish we could do colour! (it does look a lot like an early autochrome...

Pouring the plate...

... starting to fix...

... and fully fixed.  Note how the image has changed from a milky negative to a positive.

Alana sat in the 'hot seat' supposedly just for an exposure test but we ended up making a proper plate as the flowers she brought looked so good.

After my original demo, everyone poured their own plates.

Daryl wearing the focusing cloth. The floral side often gets used as a prop...

Harriet's plate was less successful. A bit of motion blur, some marks and quite a big area of emulsion lifting around the "island" on the right meant we had a second go:

Much better! Everyone was getting into things like background tone by this point.

Naomi's plate is just lovely.  Natural window light and a single fill-in reflector is all we used all day.

Rory working both the floral headdress and the focus cloth for a terrific pagan "Green Man" look.

Alana wanted to try something different: A photogram contact print. This is tricky as you can't really let anything touch the wet collodion emulsion as it's extremely soft and sticky. The solution was to invert the plate (emulsion down), supporting it just at the corners and place the plants on the dry back side. Exposure time under the 5x4 enlarger was around 30 seconds for a half-plate. It works both as a positive and a negative so here are both versions.

Naomi's second plate. All the images we made were half-plates, made on my Chapman 12x15 camera with the Cooke 12" portrait lens.

Except...

Hayden's acquired an exquisite little quarter-plate Watson "hand & stand" camera, complete with plate holders. We had to try it, so we made a couple of tintypes. 

hmmm... Watson 1/4 plate meets Chapman 12"x15"

The view from the sitter's chair. The Watson's less intimidating than the big Chapman

I haven't got the plates Hayden made on the little Watson (they were great!) but if we can, I'll add scans here.  In the meantime, well done everyone for making an inspired, original and beautiful series of portraits!  I demonstrate the techniques and do the donkey work of sensitising and developing the plates but the images; how they look and feel is down to the skill and inspiration of the people in the workshop.

Peter.