wet plate ghost
This is my grandfather's camera, with my ~5yo point & shoot next to it for scale.
This past Thursday they were doing one of their wet-plate photography demos at work, so I got the chance to have a photo taken with the camera using that technique. Wet plate photography was popular from about 1850-1900 (replaced daguerreotype, being both easier and safer. Fun fact, making daguerreotypes involved vaporizing mercury to just below the point where it explodes. Guess what a lot of early photographers died of) and was essentially the Polaroid of its day. From prepping the plate to image takes about ten minutes, although there is some optional developing time, it's way more immediate than say, modern chemical photography. It's also quite portable. The entire setup fits on a kitchen table. I mean, it's still not exactly the most convenient thing in the world--the image is tacky until it dries, and it involves cyanide (ME: how much cyanide does it take to kill you? S: As much as I have in this bottle here.), but I think it's neat.
Unfortunately, the fixer--the chemical that makes the image stay on the plate and stops the reactions--was going bad, so I had to very quickly try and take a photo of the photo before it disappeared and that's what a lot of the weirdness is. The rest is because I carried it home in a little folded paper tent and a plastic bag and wasn't as careful as I could have been.
Still, I think it looks cool.
30 second exposure. It's probably for the best you can't really see my face, as I was trying very hard to not squint in the sun and probably would have looked strange as a result. The two black spots are places where the bellows weren't quite light-tight anymore.
This past Thursday they were doing one of their wet-plate photography demos at work, so I got the chance to have a photo taken with the camera using that technique. Wet plate photography was popular from about 1850-1900 (replaced daguerreotype, being both easier and safer. Fun fact, making daguerreotypes involved vaporizing mercury to just below the point where it explodes. Guess what a lot of early photographers died of) and was essentially the Polaroid of its day. From prepping the plate to image takes about ten minutes, although there is some optional developing time, it's way more immediate than say, modern chemical photography. It's also quite portable. The entire setup fits on a kitchen table. I mean, it's still not exactly the most convenient thing in the world--the image is tacky until it dries, and it involves cyanide (ME: how much cyanide does it take to kill you? S: As much as I have in this bottle here.), but I think it's neat.
Unfortunately, the fixer--the chemical that makes the image stay on the plate and stops the reactions--was going bad, so I had to very quickly try and take a photo of the photo before it disappeared and that's what a lot of the weirdness is. The rest is because I carried it home in a little folded paper tent and a plastic bag and wasn't as careful as I could have been.
Still, I think it looks cool.
30 second exposure. It's probably for the best you can't really see my face, as I was trying very hard to not squint in the sun and probably would have looked strange as a result. The two black spots are places where the bellows weren't quite light-tight anymore.