Processing and wet plate experiments, 8th & 9th August.
The first job on the Monday was to process the 5th, 6th and 7th shoots. I had been using a changing bag to reuse the dark slides. This involved taking the exposed film out of the slides, and storing it in a light-tight empty film box. The theory here is that I could shoot more and the process in bulk. This worked to a point, but there were a couple of technical issues. On the first process I forgot to place the little drainage cap on the processing tank. The developer ran into the tank and straight out again. By the time I located the cap, the batch of negatives had had a small amount of developer run over them. This caused overdevelopment in the areas of the neg effected.
Throughout this process â Iâve mentioned it before â I am struck with the fragility of the process â how a small error compounds. This leads to an unusable neg, a fogged neg, and damaged neg â any number of things where that unique moment in time is lost due to technical â and user errors. We have all become complacent with digital photography and have forgotten â at least I had â the technical discipline of analogue. It will bite, the moment you are not paying attention. I learnt on analogue â but that seems a long time ago, and the work did not seem to have the same gravity as this work â the effort of stopping someone, a stranger, photographing them, only to have that spoilt by a technical error. It somehow seems slightly unethical, to take the time of someone, and then lose the image.
Of course, the process is imperfect. The act of the double exposure is sometimes an amazing work of light, chemicals and a sort of photographic alchemy, more often than not itâs not quite worked for some reason.
Caylin Smith quotes Godfrey to remind us âphotographs might be imprints of light on light-sensitive papers, but this guarantees little in terms of iconicity â whatever the photographer intended, photographs might witness the mechanical limitations of the camera or the accidents of the darkroom.â (Smith, C. 2012. p28)
I come to my point about not managing the dark slides very well on the shoot on the 23rd. Itâs really important that there is a system when it comes to this â particularly as there are two exposures on one negative. I manage this by a small strip of camera tape on each of the slides, numbered. Once I have shot the 14 portraits (on 7 dark slides) I then move onto the architecture phase. Having (re) used a neg, I then put a cross through the number written on the strip of camera tape to indicate two exposures on this neg. Itâs then put in another pocket of the Billingham. Thatâs the theory.
On the 16th and 23rd I was reusing camera tape. I thought I could simply rewrite new numbers on the tape and then cross them out. Fine, in principle. However, itâs these small errors that cost â complacency. Maybe. Such is the course of human failure! A big statement, but little mistakes cumulate to cause the disasters. OK â these are only photographic negs, but there is a point here about process. How a small error in a process, can have unwanted results, even if the process seemed straightforward enough â it was actually flawed.
When the batches of these negs were developed, there were a number of âstraightâ portraits. So, a number of times I had not double exposed the neg. This was due to the failure in the numbering and recording process on the dark slides.
For the next batch of photos, I made sure I changed all the tape.
Any lessons to be learned? Sure, see above. But if I can take one thing away, it was useful to see the images without the double exposure. It was far easier to judge the exposure, and to see that, in some places, although the exposure was technically good, it wouldnât have been good for the double exposure, and in fact, I actually needed to be heading more towards overexposing both images on the same neg. So, this was noted and undertaken for the next shoot.
Creating the âglass platesâ for printing
I started with 10 glass plates as I have mentioned earlier in this diary. The first part of the process was to clean them thoroughly as a preparation for the varnish âsubbingâ layer.
Applying the subbing layer was initially tricky. Glass is very unforgiving, and the varnish did not cover well. The initial plates needed cleaning off, and a new method was required. Using a foam roller was better â this resulted in an even coating of varnish.
The images show both the brush marks in the varnish and the result using the roller, which is better. However, as time would tell, ultimately there was a fatal flaw in the first part of this process.
The second part of the process involves adding the liquid emulsion to the plate. The subbing layer of varnish keeps the emulsion in place. The emulsion is tricky to work with. It needs heating to 40 degrees before it becomes liquid and can be spread onto the plates under a safe light. The images show the setup I used to get ready for the emulsion.
The first go â trying to coat the plate in the style of wet collodion just did not work at all. Trying a brush left large streaks in the emulsion. After purchasing different brushes and foam brushes, no one technique worked particularly well. They all left marks on the emulsion. However, 10 plates were prepared for exposure.
A test strip was prepared using mount board coated in liquid emulsion. The mount board was roughly 3mm thick â a good appropriation for the thickness of the glass to focus the enlarger. These first test strips showed an exposure time of 10 secs at f11. Upon development, the paintbrush streaks were very evident. This was a problem. I know that for some approaches the paintbrush aesthetic of the liquid emulsion is welcomed, but I wasnât particularly happy with the result.
The first plate was exposed. A note here about the exposure in the enlarger â once the light shines on the plate for the exposure the image seems to disappear into the glass â a ghostly effect at the exposure stage. There may be something in the reaction of the light with the glass, but it looks as though the exposure has lost focus.
When the first glass plate went into the developer, the fatal flaw was revealed. The emulsion layer peeled away and lifted off the plate completely. It was tricky to see if any exposure had occurred as now the emulsion was a film floating in the developer. There had obviously been a failure with the subbing layer of varnish. A second exposure revealed the same fault.
Obviously, this was disappointing given the time taken to prepare the plates and the expense of the liquid emulsion. Researching the problem revealed that matt varnish should not be used for the subbing layer â so although I used a variation of the varnish recommended, the details were not sufficient in Silver Gelatin, A Users Guide To Liquid Photographic Emulsions by Martin Reed and Sarah Jones, (1995) â no mention of the water-based varnish being unusable. Sometimes the hardest lessons can be useful however, and more research and talking to the good people at Silverprint, resulted in the purchase of gelatin and hardening agent, plus a really good guide to the process which will be followed next time!
There is something interesting â perhaps a metaphor for a project searching for traces and ghosts, that the first attempts to recreate a wet plate result in the images slipping away into the liquid, like they have slipped away into time, much like the missing archive.
