Varnishing

The final step in the plate making process is Varnishing. It entails warming both a mixture of Sandrach varnish (resin and lavender oil) as well as your plate via an alcohol lamp (thank you PCC Dentistry for the 90% alcohol solution) and coating your plate evenly so as to create a protective and glossy barrier between your emulsion and the outside world.

It's not a particularly tricky process and I've had great success in the past during workshops, however, I did run into a few issues that I have not been able to sort out yet.  The most disappointing was that I lost some of my image on a few of the plates - and they were some of my favorite plates.  I'm hoping to figure out the cause and prevent that in the future. I'll report back here what I find out.

Presenting to Peers...

Our district Subject Area Committee (SAC) meets two to three times during the academic year and I wanted to share what I was doing with my colleagues so I presented at the Spring SAC meeting and attempted to take a group portrait.

It was an exercise that proved to be more difficult than I expected given the weather, the time-intensive set up and the general difficulty trying to do something for the first time in front of a bunch of people.  It was not unlike trying to parallel park with passengers in the car.  It all was in good fun - but the presentation went better than the group photo.  I'm lucky that I have supportive peers who understand process is all part of the practice. There wasn't a successful image from this portrait in the way that I could show them a good photograph, but I learned valuable information about developing solution temperature and the effects of rain drops on freshly poured collodion, so I will call it a 'win.'

World Wide Wet Plate Day

May 6th 2017 is World Wide Wet Plate Day, an International celebration of the Wet Plate process and I took the opportunity to spend a whole Saturday at Sylvania Campus taking portraits and inviting participants to learn a little more about this historical process.

It was a good opportunity to really put the workflow to the test. I did have some students volunteer to sit but also who were integral to my crew - they helped set up and break down and as the day went on, the evolution from 'helper' to 'docent' was organic.  I overheard students explaining stages, processes and overall history to some of the newer and younger participants and there was a fantastic discussion throughout the day about direct cause and effect relationship between exposure, chemistry and image.

Because this work was made possible in part by the Richard and Betty Duvall Professional Development Award, I am obligated to quantify and report after predicting the benefits and effects of my learning on the learning of my students.   I've been teaching art to many age levels in many iterations and roles for over twenty years and at the proposal of this project I knew, as many of us who teach do, that everything I learn and experience ends up in the classroom.  I had a great deal of certainty going into this that my students, if they were involved - even in just assisting me in my process - they would learn so much and in turn be able to teach others.

This is precisely what happened that day.  The students who sat, assisted and got involved were caught up in the rippling out effect of my own discovery and they learned, as I did, through experience.

The beginning - with wet plate

This last Spring I applied for a professional development award. The Betty and Richard Duvall professional development award was intended to help faculty at Portland Community College pursue work, research, a project, etc. that would, in turn, enrich their students' learning experience.

I've been playing around with the wet-plate collodion process - only having taken a workshop or two - but never have I done this process on my own.  I was inspired to develop a practice that would allow me to both learn this process well enough to do it on my own but also well enough so that I can develop curriculum around it.

First attempts - in the kiln yard

Today I was able to finally - FINALLY - make my first exposure.

all lined up in the plate holder

I took the advice of a number of folks on line and made a test strip.  I found that my exposure should be around 4 seconds - however, I had accidentally opened up the aperture with the dark slide pulled before I started counting seconds. This is typical for me.  So I tacked on another second or two.  I'm very precise.

Plate one:

first exposure of about 6 seconds and developed at 30 +/- sec

Plate two:

Plate three: exposure - 10 sec / dark slide pulled almost all the way out / develop 1 min / wash 15 sec / fix 5 min / wash 10

Plate four: exposure - 12 sec / dark slide pulled all the way out to avoid black bar / develop 1 min / wash 15 sec / fix 5 min / wash 10

Problem:

last two plates are sparkly - why?

Answer:

pushing developing process for too long/far - results in sparkles or spangles