SchwinnParamount
Member
I bought this book today. Some of it is deeply beautiful. Well, most of it is. Sally uses a LF camera and I guess it is wet collodion plates. She describes coating the plates with emulsion in her truckbed mounted darkroom right before exposure.
The thing is, many of the plates were badly coated. With some of them, the subject is so badly obscured that you cannot begin to guess what she was photographing. Others are mostly great except there are many small artifacts from her coating which float through the images.
She used what looks like a period lens which was designed for a smaller format. The lens cannot hope to cover her negative so you see large areas of vignetting in every plate. Where there is coverage, only the center of the image is fairly clear. The outer portions all show spherical abberations.
I wonder why she included some of the really poorly coated plates? Sure, the others where you actually see the subject are quite beautiful and worth showing. But why show a plate where the subject is entirely obscured by white?
Has anybody else seen this book?... which I still recommend in spite of my criticism
The thing is, many of the plates were badly coated. With some of them, the subject is so badly obscured that you cannot begin to guess what she was photographing. Others are mostly great except there are many small artifacts from her coating which float through the images.
She used what looks like a period lens which was designed for a smaller format. The lens cannot hope to cover her negative so you see large areas of vignetting in every plate. Where there is coverage, only the center of the image is fairly clear. The outer portions all show spherical abberations.
I wonder why she included some of the really poorly coated plates? Sure, the others where you actually see the subject are quite beautiful and worth showing. But why show a plate where the subject is entirely obscured by white?
Has anybody else seen this book?... which I still recommend in spite of my criticism