I have many books with the photographs of early wet plate photographers especially of Yosemite. Muybridge,Watkins and Fiske to name a few. I'm just wondering if I have been successful in replicating the look and feel. The processing of a color image requires a knowledge of what makes the wet plate photographs so different from the later giants of Black and White Adams and Weston. First the color image is made very blue in the midtone and highlight range, then when the image is converted the blue filter channel is used. The reason for this is the wetplate chemicals were more sensitive to the blue spectrum of light. To separate this image even further I used the spotlight effect( which duplicates the circular mattes that were common at that time)in elements in the filters program. Olympus e-500 Iso 100 f22 1/100.
I know that we have many LF photographers in our group, these are your precursors,at least you don't have to develop your images in the field like they did ( they had portable darkrooms) but the equipment is similar in size an weight unless they were doing mammoth wet plates of a size of 18" by 24". I had posted this is Photo Art, but I wanted to share with the group.
Paul, you have done a nice job making it look old. Interesting exercise.
Posted by Lon Overacker on August 8, 2010 at 4:08 PM
Paul,
First off, I have to say that I think you're on to something. I don't recall any effort anywhere that had photographers or someone trying to replicate the old images using modern techniques and images. Think about that....
And I think this is a wonderful start. A couple things though. I think the bottom half isn't really reflective of the top. The tones are different as is the contrast and seemingly the top seems more like a replication of 19th century photography, where as the bottom seems like a modern day digital conversion... if that makes sense. If you could replicate the look and feel of the top to the bottom, this would be really excellent. The second suggestion is that the oval mat is more transparent at the top? I would think you would want a consistent look all the way around. But that's just me.
Oh, and lastly, have you tried any sepia type toning? I haven't studied any images from old wet plate techniques, so maybe the tones are more blue as you have mentioned.
I think you should pursue this on a broader scale!
Discussion
2 repliesI know that we have many LF photographers in our group, these are your precursors,at least you don't have to develop your images in the field like they did ( they had portable darkrooms) but the equipment is similar in size an weight unless they were doing mammoth wet plates of a size of 18" by 24". I had posted this is Photo Art, but I wanted to share with the group.
Paul
First off, I have to say that I think you're on to something. I don't recall any effort anywhere that had photographers or someone trying to replicate the old images using modern techniques and images. Think about that....
And I think this is a wonderful start. A couple things though. I think the bottom half isn't really reflective of the top. The tones are different as is the contrast and seemingly the top seems more like a replication of 19th century photography, where as the bottom seems like a modern day digital conversion... if that makes sense. If you could replicate the look and feel of the top to the bottom, this would be really excellent. The second suggestion is that the oval mat is more transparent at the top? I would think you would want a consistent look all the way around. But that's just me.
Oh, and lastly, have you tried any sepia type toning? I haven't studied any images from old wet plate techniques, so maybe the tones are more blue as you have mentioned.
I think you should pursue this on a broader scale!
Lon