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Dry Plate Gallery

Nodda Duma said:
Very nice, Paul. How did the negative look (thin, dense, etc)?
Click to expand...

Neg was on the thin side (you'd never get a good alt process print out of it, and silver gelatin printing would require a grade 4 or more), and a tad flat. If I remember correctly i kept it in the Xtol for 12 or 13 minutes. Enough information to extract a reasonably good image from, with digital help.
 

Thanks for the insight on the look of the negative. I'm taking notes to do some digging later, because results from plates lately seem to have been running on the thin side. I'm not sure if that's due to most folks shooting indoors (less UV) or if the emulsion batches are coming out slower. What's the batch # on the back of your box? I keep trying to make time to shoot some plates but can't seem to find it. Try shooting at ISO 1 if you metered at 2.

I don't have experience w/ Xtol, beyond that it's similar to D76 except results in finer grain. As for D76, the plates prefer Stock D-76...in other words, the plates like active developers... I'm not sure how that correlates to Xtol. As you may have guessed, my fave is HC-110. I use that for everything.

Cheers,
Jason
 

Jason,
Thanks!

This is batch 010, same box as other "studio" tests I made using compact fluorescent lighting.

This morning, I decided that to do a more reasonable test of the speed of this emulsion, I should go out where I could photograph a local scene in bright daylight, so I went into town and shot one of the older buildings in the area. I calculated exposure at 1 second at f16, for 1ASA (not surprising, given the conditions) So what I did was to treat the first plate like a test strip: five 1 second exposures, pulling out the dark slide a bit more with each exposure. The verdict? The three second exposure gave me what I regard as the minimum ideal exposure for the scene. Five seconds was perfectly usable too, but one second gave a thin negative.
The second plate I exposed at 3 seconds at f16, aiming for the middle of my test strip plate: I assumed that if it was overexposed, it wouldn't be outrageously dense, so I erred on the side of overexposure. This plate was pretty decent, developed in Rodinal 1:25 for 7 minutes. So outdoor natural light (June 12, for future reference) gave better results, but the plate still needed much more exposure than the 2ASA box rating would suggest. I will post scans this evening.
 


This is a scan of the second plate: 3 seconds at f16, developed in Rodinal 1:25 for 7 minutes.



This one is the "test strip" plate: five 1 second increments at f16. Same processing as above.
 
Great test, thanks. I do all my testing using HC-110 dil B, and have no experience with Rodinal. If I remember correctly, batch 10 was from March, and I had some acceptably dense ASA 2 test plates from that batch, New England overcast snowy scenes. .

So is HC-110 a more aggressive developer than Rodinal?
 

I have zero experience with HC-110, so I can't offer a comparison. Seems to me Rodinal is plenty aggressive at 1:25
 
Chapel of the Holly Cross Sedona Az. ...
J.Lane Dry Plate 9x12 f22@16 for .5 sec. So much detail, from a thin, underexposed neg.. was shocked.

 
Very nice!

Personally I enjoy seeing what can be done with the dry plates in the hands of photographers way more skilled than myself!

Regards,
Jason
 
Hahaha ah ha.. that's funny, but thank you, sometimes one can just get lucky. Like this shot!
Its an Zeiss Adora folder that we took the picture out of, but its so small, and have not shot it that much. So the exposure needed was for two seconds, done on a tripod, in the back of a pick up truck, with all the early morning crowd driving by, into the location. So set it on 2, ... instead of selecting B for bulb, and fired it. For... Da.. ... half a second. ;-)
Was amazed how well it scanned for such a thin negative..
 
Thanks... I’ve actually worked to tweak the emulsion so that there’s a nice long toe and plenty of detail in the shadows. Kind of needs it since so many colors are dark.
 
Maybe Jason or someone else on this thread can help with a problem I'm seeing with (so far) four J. Lane dry plates I've recently shot. I'm consistently getting a band of increased density on the negative, about 1/4 inches wide around all sides of the image, as shown below. This is a snap of the plate on a lightbox and a scan of a 5x7 contact print. Three additional processed plates show the same thing, all from different plate holders.





I'm using a 5x7 Eastman View No.2 with an Ektar 203mm lens and Eastman plate holders.
- I've eliminated the camera/lens as a problem as I've shot a lot of 5x7 film (in film holders) with no problems.
- The plate holders seem to be good as I've tested those with paper negatives and this issue has not appeared, nor have any light leaks.
- I'm using Jason's recommended processing procedure in HC110, and gentle agitation in 8x10 trays.

I don't want to use any more plates until I can identify the cause of this problem, but I'm out of ideas at this point.

Thanks All.
 
Nice shot!

That’s not a problem, but an artifact of the emulsion drawing away from the edge of the dry plate. You see them to lesser or greater extent in both new plates and in dry plates from the era.

These are contact prints I made off plates in the collection of my town’s historical society. The plates are about 120 years old. They show the same effect.





Welcone to the 1880s!
 
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Thanks Jason! I've printed quite a few older negatives, but never glass plates so I wasn't familiar with this.
My chemical/wash temps were all at 72F, as that was ambient temperature in the darkroom, and I used HC110 dilution H to get longer development times. Do you think this would be less visible with lower processing temps and/or shorter processing times? I'm thinking maybe the less time the plate is wet the less this will occur.
But I'm having a blast using these plates. Portraits are next to try. Only problem is my spot meter only goes down to ISO 12, so that forces me to think even more to get the exposures right.
 
Maybe, but only insofar as cooler temps and different dilutions would normally affect contrast for any film. I haven’t characterized the emulsion other than at my recommended dev time and temp so I can’t say what the effect would actually be.

In reality, the biggest driver is the emulsion coating, followed by halation effects at the glass edge. Those are characteristics of dry plate. Looking at recent plates I’ve shot, the effect width is less than 1/4”, maybe more like 1/8”.
 
Today's effort with J. Lane Dry Plates, in 8X10. I shot this at about 0.5 ASA, and processed in BER49 (because its what I had) for 7 minutes, and got a very nice negative.
Camera: Intrepid 8X10 fitted with an old brass Darlot magic lantern lens of some sort. No idea what the F value was (I guessed it around f11). In all, I am very pleased with the result. This Darlot lens actually works very well with dry (and wet) plates.

 
re these plates and the ones that jimjm posted: Is it possible we're seeing two different things? Without seeing the original plates, I'm guessing the historical ones are getting their edge density from silver tarnish. It usually starts at the edges of a plate and moves in. The slow and uneven fade is a clue. Many plates of the time were coated in large sheets, dried, and then cut to size. There's usually just a very thin pull-back of the emulsion on the edges, not enough to even be in the exposure area. The density ring on jimjm's plates look more like extra-thick emulsion that's pooled around the edges. Still a lovely plate and image, however.
 
Gorgeous!
 
Many old plates were abraded with a coarse file to create a "tooth" in the glass that the gelatin could adhere to and which was supposed to prevent the problem of the gelatin pulling away. It seems to happen for some and not for others though so who can say what it is due to. It may be that some surfactant might inhibit this as well.

PE
 

When I make glass negatives using the wet plate technique, I always take a sharpening stone to the edges of the glass, to create a coarse surface at the sides for the collodion to adhere to. I also edge the glass with albumen to further enhance the sticking of the collodion: it definitely does help, and its a very simple and quick step in the process.
 
Had a thought in the meantime. We used to use Carbowax (about #1000 or higher) to help relax the gelatin and prevent curl.

PE
 
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