Thanks to eBay, I now own a large vintage holder for my glas plates. It is quite a nice object, which you can fold together when it is not needed.
I was originally thinking of building one myself, or of getting a kitchen plate holder for the purpose … But I could not resist this vintage one when it showed up on eBay.
By now I also solved the problem of where to get the chemicals that I will need for the collodion process, as you cannot just go to a store around the corner to simply buy them. It did cause me some headaches at first, but serendipity just did the trick.
The only things missing now is to actually learn the process – the workshop is in July – and to get the right glas plates.
Another lucky shot at eBay a week ago!
“Collodion And the Making of Wet Plate Negatives”, from Eastman Kodak Company, was printed in 1929, and is a very nice illustrated handbook (and price catalogue!). It is hard to believe that all these perfect images on the cover and inside are in itself probably made from wet plate negatives.
I am definitively more interested in the shortcomings of collodion – or let us say, in the possibilities, these shortcomings offer me – than in the perfect image it can produce.
But 1929 makes me feel nostalgic. A bit.
I have not read the whole book yet. Maybe I will add a note or two to this post 
As my collodion workshop quickly approaches, I am randomly looking around eBay to find interesting material related to the topic. I find it quite hard to believe that collodion was wildly used not so very long ago – where did all the stuff go? Because it is rather difficult to find anything useful or interesting.
So you can just imagine my big smile when I managed to place the winning bid on this piece of glas with a stereoscopic image of the anatomy of a man’s ear, dated somewhere between 1880 and 1900.
I am really inspired now … Ears, anyone?
It was born over a century ago as a healthy “18×13″.
Just booked a summer workshop in England to learn how to feed it with Collodion … and I have yet to find out how to get the chemicals here in Germany.
Cannot wait!!!
