Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my family and I headed south for a several-day visit with my brother and his wife, who live in the foothills north of Phoenix, Arizona. Excited about the opportunity to shoot in a new location, I packed a lot of wet plate gear, taking up much of the cargo space (we wrapped the dark box in a tarp and strapped it down to the top of the Xterra). I'm grateful that my husband and daughter didn't seem to mind!
I worked on three different days, with varying temperatures and degrees of sunny/overcast skies, but one thing that was really a new experience was the decline in humidity and the rapidity with which the plates started to dry out. Southwest Colorado, where I live, is not a humid place, but I typically have a fair bit of time in which to work--so I had never seen plates dry like that.
3x5 alumitype 11/25/2015
The darkness at the upper corners is from the collodion drying, that in the lower right corner is just a bad pour.... I think there are some hints of clouds in that sky!
I also experienced the effects of cold (yeah, you wouldn't have thunk it since we were in Arizona!), but the morning of my second session was very chilly and my chemicals had been outside over night. When I set up that morning, it was in the shade, which wasn't warming up enough and my first two plates were very dark, despite a correct exposure. Leaving the plate in the silver bath longer helped a little, but moving everything into sunlight and letting the silver bath and collodion warm up made all the difference. Between the cold, the exposure issues I had while trying to get a decent image of the nearby KOA campground, and trying to find and compose interesting shots without deep shadows or power lines, this was one of my worst wet plate days ever and I was very discouraged. I did manage to get a decent image of some sandstone stairs.
5x7 alumitype 11/27/2015
I need much more experience/help/advice with shooting landscapes. I tried a trick that M. Carey Lea described in his 1868 A Manual of Photography--dodging the sky during the exposure (I used the dark slide) and that seemed to help some with the overexposure and provided some hints of, or perhaps the illusion of, clouds, but I have much more to learn and felt largely frustrated with my attempts.
Snowbird Encampment - Black Canyon City, Arizona 5x7 alumitype 11/28/2015
This was my best landscape, but it still has a lot of fog on the distant hills.
5x7 alumitype 11/28/2015
My best saguaro shot--need to go back and find others with arms, preferably in an accessible location.
I worked primarily with my Steinheil lens, but in my third session I went for some portraits, and finally tried out the Industar 37 lens (300 mm) that I bought several months ago, but had to wait to use, lacking a mounting flange. I am really thrilled with how these plates turned out.
3x5 alumitype 11/28/2015
3x5 alumitype 11/28/2015
3x5 alumitype 11/28/2015
3x5 alumitype 11/28/2015
Working so much out of my dark box, I really got comfortable with it and had a good work flow going. I do need to find a smaller mouth bottle to pour the 3x5 plates with--I just couldn't get the hang of it with my current pour bottle and ended up with collodion running down my hand and wrist--a real mess! The Sonoran Desert definitely presented me with some tough challenges, but I feel determined and optimistic about returning to tackle them in the future. Fortunately, I ended up with several images that I'm really pleased with, and as always, I learned a lot.
P.S. Nearly all of the plates I scanned for this post are much lighter, especially in the shadows, than they appear here. My scanner doesn't go beyond 600 dpi and the higher resolution scanners (I'm thinking Epson) are beyond my means for the moment, so I'm doing the best with what I have. It's very frustrating.