I have taken a temporary hiatus from shooting glass plates as I kept getting sinus infections, even though I was wearing masks. I am missing it at the moment and dug up this old plate.

The emulsion is bubbling, in a warped striated pattern, and peeling.

When I first began attempting the wet plate process, friend and amazing artist Kurt Sorensen was just moving into this process having previously been working with medium or large format film to create evocative dreamlike landscapes, steeped in Australian colonial history. Quite often I have found myself ringing Kurt to ask if he has experienced the […]

 It has been a while since I posted, so I thought I would post an image from my most recent shoot.  I had trouble with exposures, it looked like a beautiful sunny day, and all the digital images I shot were perfectly bright. However the Ambrotypes were all terribly long exposures. The patient sitter was there […]

I looked up “back in the fray,”  and the meaning I liked best was back in the struggle, or back in the fight.  This struck me as apt as it has been several months since I took out my chemicals. After the last shoot there was a heatwave of several days over 40 degrees celsius. […]

I see collodion as the stinky volatile friend at the party who makes it interesting, but potentially explosive if they drink too much. Collodion  is mixed with iodide, bromide or chloride. Collodion is used for it’s properties as a base that sticks to the glass, a gel that is the canvas for the image. It […]

Silver nitrate is very important, it can make or break an image very easily, despite knowing this fact, it is all too easy to try to speed up the waiting time. These two images were taken within a short time, light conditions were the same, timing was the same, temperature was the same, but I […]

This image has white marks all over the sitter. I am guessing it is because I took the image at the end of a long shoot and should have changed the chemistry, the image I took right after was fine. So it is a bit of mystery the exact cause, as is proving to be […]

So I had a relatively successful day, it is only the 4th time I have shot wetplates. I had a particularly lovely sitter and somehow everything was working…Except it wasn’t! It was a very hot day and I had the collodion out in the sun (big mistake) result = goopy collodion. So I made a […]

  So I have created several plates and much to my horror and dismay have realised I didn’t leave some of them in the fixer for long enough. There is a positive side to this, I was able to watch the deterioration of one image which was very interesting. The downside of course, I lost […]

The first person I tried to shoot sat for a full day and I had no luck. I felt abject and despondent. Maybe I’m not cut out for this? A whole day wasted and smug blank glass plates … I  finally realised that the filtered sunlight coming through the window didn’t contain enough UV light. […]