Dry Plate Photography and Following Through
It’s 9 a.m. Monday morning, I’ve had 3 hours sleep in the last 72 hours and I look like an under-ripe heirloom tomato. Trying to be creative when you have no talent can take its toll. Every speed bump is Mount Everest. Just trying to write these words I have been stopped for days at a time by the easiest to overcome roadblocks, Nearly dead battery? Gotta charge it because if it dies then I might loose a precious thought. And that charge time becomes three days of me not making progress on this project.
Getting blocked for two or three days because I wanted to charge the laptop is nothing when compared to how log this posting has been in the works. I started on this project sometime in 2018. On a trip to the flea market I purchased some dry plates for around $5.00. At the time, I thought that these would make a great video, one that would get likes, comments, and subscribes. You know, all those things that every budding YouTuber wants from a video.
Once I got home the blue meanies attacked with their chorus of “you don’t know how to digitize these” (I didn’t). “Your camera doesn’t do 4k so it isn’t good for making videos”, (It doesn't). “You don’t know anything about this ‘dry plate’ technique”, (I didn’t). So it was easy to just sit them on a shelf and forget about them, only to be reminded of how cool the video could be when I came across them every few months.
A fun thing about time is that as it progresses things change which allowed me to beat back the blue meanies. I purchased a light pad that I use to view negatives which turns out is pretty good for looking at these dry plates. I purchased a camera boom, which again turns out to be good for holding my Leica CL paired with a Sigma 30MM 1.4 DC DN lens to digitize the plates.
This is my simple setup I used to digitize the images in this posting: Light tracing pad, camera boom, Leica CL paired with a Sigma 30MM 1.4 DC DN lens. I use the Leica FOTOS app on my iPad Pro to capture the images.
Once I had climbed that series of mountains there was nothing stopping from putting together a video of some sort, right? If only it were that easy. Once the untalented gets past the simple mountains, they find themselves in bat country where things get down right weird.
Bat country is the part of the journey where you punch yourself in the face over and over again. Focused images? Who needs it? Time to re-digitize all the images. And then there was the time I reformatted the SD card, for reasons I guess. Re-digitize one more time. Do I have enough images? Search eBay and buy more to go through the process of digitizing and editing for that lot.
I have the images scanned and an idea of what they are and what they mean, but I still don’t have a good video planned. I have an idea of what I want to be but I have to articulate that idea, so check back in four years when I have climbed the next set of mountains to slay the triplet dragons of writing a script, shooting video, and editing the video into a story.
In the meantime, checkout the galleries below for the best of the scans.
I tried to break these down into different modern genres of photography. The above gallery are slice of life images. I wouldn’t call them “street photography” because some are in a field, but I would like to think the photographers were trying to record the world around them.
This gallery is what I would call “travel photography”.
These seem to me to be what I would call snap-shots. There doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into these other than to capture what is in front of the camera.
I think the photographers in these were trying to make an artistic statement.
Finally, the portraits. I feel like the artist in these was trying to tell a story about the subjects rather that simply record who they were with at a moment in time.
