Help on making dry plates and papers

Rae Adams (rae.adams@gtri.gatech.edu)
Mon, 18 Sep 1995 11:01:17 -0500

For the past few months, I have been reading vintage and more contemporary
materials on making negatives (gelatin-silver and collodion dry plates) and
papers (collodio-silver and gelatin-silver). I'm interested in making
negatives and papers on a small scale for my own use. From my readings, I'm
beginning to get a good idea of the difficulty (previous word underlined,
boldfaced, and italicized) of such projects and would appreciate hearing
from anyone who has tried this. Do you have formulas that seem especially
useful that you can share? Also, have you tried chemical and spectral
sensitization of the emulsions if you used older formulas? Have you tried
flocculating and centrifuging the gelatin instead of the procedure of
noodling and washing?

Since I haven't done any actual work in this area, at this point I can't
offer any information to the group other than an eclectic bibliograhy on
the subject. However, as the project progresses (or doesn't!), I'll be glad
to post results to the group if there is interest or to individuals if you
send me an address.

I apologize if this sort of request isn't appropriate to the group and
would appreciate guidance where it might be appropriate or perhaps contacts
with people who are interested in small-scale preparation of gelatin-silver
or collodio-silver materials.

Thank you.