A Guide to the Dry Plate Process of Photography - Camera Series Vol. XVII.

Various

Description

This book contains classic material dating back to the 1900s and before. The content has been carefully selected for its interest and relevance to a modern audience. Carefully selecting the best articles from our collection we have compiled a series of historical and informative publications on the subject of photography. The titles in this range include "A Guide to Portrait Photography" "A Photographer's Guide to Printing" "A Guide to Landscape Photography" and many more. Each publication has been professionally curated and includes all details on the original source material. This particular instalment, "A Guide to the Dry Plate Process of Photography" contains information on collodion, drying, the bath and much more. It is intended to illustrate the main aspects of the dry plate process and serves as a guide for anyone wishing to obtain a general knowledge of the subject and understand the field in its historical context. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Histoire de la photographie
• Photographie
• Techniques photographiques
• Photographie Créative
• Equipment
• Techniques
• Photography
• Technique photographique

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781473357501
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Guide to the Dry Plate Process of Photography
Camera Series Vol. XVII.
A Selection of Classic Articles on Collodion, Drying, the Bath and Other Aspects of the Dry Plate Process
By
Various Authors
Copyright 2011 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A History of Photography
Photography is the science, art and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.
The word photography was created from the Greek roots ph tos , meaning light and graph , meaning representation by means of lines - together meaning drawing with light. Several people may have coined this term independently, and Hercules Florence, a French painter and inventor, used the French form (photographie), in private notes written in 1834. Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, is credited with having used it in an article published on 25th February 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung . Despite these two early precedents, credit has traditionally been given to Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. His uses of it in private correspondence prior to 25th February 1839, and at his Royal Society lecture on the subject in London on 14th March 1839, have long been amply documented.
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Di, and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid, described a pinhole camera in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. In the sixth century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments; Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) discovered silver nitrate; and Georg Fabricius (1516-71) discovered silver chloride. Techniques described in the Book of Optics (an Arab text dealing with vision, light and colour, written in the tenth century CE) were also capable of producing primitive imagery.
Despite these early precedents in pin-hole and camera obscura, the first real success at reproducing images without a camera occurred when Thomas Wedgwood, from the famous family of potters, obtained copies of paintings on leather using silver salts. Since he had no way of permanently fixing those reproductions (stabilizing the image by washing out the non-exposed silver salts), they would turn completely black in the light and thus had to be kept in a dark room for viewing. Photography as a usable process (i.e. with lasting images) dates to the 1820s with the discovery of chemical photography. The first medium was photographic plate, and the first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nic phore Ni pce (1765 - 1833). This image was sadly destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it.
Because Ni pce s photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days) - he sought to improve his process, and achieved this alongside Louis Daguerre (1787 - 1851). Ni pce discovered a somewhat more sensitive process that produced visually superior results, but still required a few hours of exposure in the camera. Ni pce died in 1833 and Daguerre then redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive silver halides, which Ni pce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images light-fast and permanent. Daguerre s efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process ; the essential elements of which were in place in 1837. With this breakthrough, exposure time was now measured in minutes instead of hours.
Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street. Unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy boulevard, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the approximately ten-minute exposure to be visible. Around this time, other scientists were also beginning to experiment with photographic processes - such as Hercules Florence (a Frenchman living in Brazil) who created his own process in 1832, and an English inventor, William Fox Talbot, who had created another method of making a reasonably light-fast silver process image but kept his work secret. After reading about Daguerre s invention in January 1839, Talbot published his method and set about improving on it.
At first, like other pre-daguerreotype processes, Talbot s paper-based photography typically required hours-long exposures in the camera, but in 1840 he created the calotype process , with exposures comparable to the daguerreotype. In both its original and calotype forms, Talbot s process, unlike Daguerre s, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies, the basis of most chemical photography up to the present day. Talbot s famous tiny paper negative of the Oriel window in Lacock Abbey (made in the summer of 1835), may be the oldest camera negative still in existence.
John Herschel (an English mathematician, astronomer, botanist and experimental photographer) also made many contributions to the new field. He invented the cyanotype process , later familiar as the blueprint , and was the first to use the terms photography , negative and positive. Herschel had discovered in 1819 that sodium thiosulphate was a solvent of silver halides, and in 1839 he informed Talbot (and, indirectly, Daguerre) that it could be used to fix silver-halide-based photographs, and make them completely light-fast. He made the first glass negative in late-1839. Many further advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made during the rest of the nineteenth century - and glass plates were the medium of choice from the late 1850s until the general introduction of flexible plastic films during the 1890s.
Although the convenience of film greatly popularized amateur photography, early films were somewhat more expensive and of markedly lower optical quality than their glass plate equivalents, and until the late 1910s they were not available in the large formats preferred by most professional photographers. Consequently, the new medium did not immediately or completely replace the old. Because of the superior dimensional stability of glass, the use of plates for some scientific applications, such as astrophotography, continued into the 1990s, and in the niche field of laser holography it has persisted into the 2010s.
Today, photography is a booming market, and cameras have become every-day objects. There have been a number of concerns on the impact of the camera on society, not least the rise of voyeurism and passive observance, as well as our modern ability to digitally manipulate images. Further unease has been caused in regards to desensitization, with explicit images widely available, such as pornography and images of war. Modern photography and society more broadly, are still coming to terms with these issues. Photography as a science and art form has an incredibly long history, stretching back to ancient civilisations - and very excitingly, it is continuing to develop in the present day. It is hoped that the current reader enjoys this book on the subject.
Contents
Instruction in Photography . Sir William De W. Abney
A Manual of Photography Founded on Hardwich s Photographic Chemistry . George Dawson
A Treatise on Photography . W. De Wiveleslie Abney
The Amateur Photographer - A Manual of Photographic Manipulation . Ellerslie Wallace
COLLODION DRY PLATE PROCESSES
T HERE are manipulations common to all collodion dry plate processes, and it is proposed to detail them here, instead of repeating them with each process. 1st. The plate is cleaned. 2nd. It is given a substratum, or edging, to cause adhesion of the film during development. 3rd. The plate is coated with collodion, and sensitised; or it may be coated with collodion containing the sensitive salts in suspension. 4th. It is coated with a preservative after washing. 5th. It is dried. 6th. It is exposed. 7th. It is developed, toned, and varnished.
Edging the Plate, or giving it a Substratum .-A plate may be edged with albumen, gelatine, or india-rubber; or the surface may receive a fine coating of any of these bodies, in order to cause adhesion of the film to it during development and subsequent treatment. It is not always absolutely necessary, when working dry plates, to give either edging or substratum; but, as a rule, it is advisable.
When a substratum is to be given to the plates, they should not be polished by the silk handkerchief. It is better to soak them first in potash, then in a dilute solution of nitric acid, and finally to rinse them thoroughly in pure distilled water. They should then be placed in a rack on clean blotting-paper, and be allowed to dry spontaneously. If albumen be employed as the substratum, the following should be made up:-

The albumen and water should be well shaken together in a bottle for five minutes, and then filtered through fine filter-paper or well-washed tow. The funnel should be lowered nearly to the bottom of the beaker into which the albumen is filtered, to prevent the formation of air-bubbles.
Another plan of preparing albumen for a substratum is due to Mr. Ackland, and described by Mr. Brooks.
The whites of fresh eggs are collected, and to every 8 ounces 1 ounce of water and 24 drops of glacial acetic acid are added, by pouring it into the albumen in a fine stream, and stirring evenly with a glass rod for one or two minutes. The albumen should on no account be beaten or whisked up, or the resulting preparation will be milky. It is allowed to rest one