While we are still under restrictions and staying safe inside, here is a selection of various stories and features regarding analogue photography from around the internet, including a rather inventive tutorial in making your own developer from household items, wet plate portraiture via the internet and other interesting and unusual experiments in analogue photography.
Wet Plate Portraiture Over The Internet
Shane Balkowitsch is a self-taught photographer based in North Dakota and has spent the last nine years creating wet plate portraits. Last month, at his studio in America, he captured a Collodion portrait of a sitter nearly 4,000 miles away in the UK. Using online video conferencing, Balkowitsch focused his lens at his computer screen, which displayed the live side-profile of his sitter who used her iPhone to light her face. The resulting image, rendered onto silver, even shows the stray cursor in the top right-hand corner of the photograph. You can watch the 45-minute sitting, including the darkroom processing, on YouTube here.
Create Your Own Developer At Home
Photographer and YouTube tutor Brendan Barry has used the lockdown as an opportunity to get creative with analogue photography at home. As well as providing video tutorials in creating a camera obscura in your bedroom or transforming your garden shed into a camera, there is also a fifteen-minute video exploring the process of using household items to make your own developer and fixer. With little more than coffee granules, vitamins, salt and washing soda, Barry leads viewers through the process from his pantry and homemade darkroom. If you are interested in giving this method a go you can view the video here.
Other items of interest from around the internet:
- If you are feeling particularly experimental in your photography, you may be inspired by this neuroscience student who has taken to capturing his portrait on algae. Read the article here, on Petapixel.com
- Or, perhaps you would like to create your own Cyanotype print using a UV LED box? Read how to on Emulsive.org, by clicking here.