Wet Plate Collodion

I had a brilliant time learning the alchemic magic of wet-plate photography yesterday; I recommend everyone try their hand at it, there's a real sense of achievement and ownership of the image when you produce a image on what minutes ago was a plain sheet of glass.
Thanks very much indeed to Laura Peters for the opportunity!

(I scanned in the plates at Boots and I'm not happy at all with the resolution, but for the purposes of sharing I s'pose it'll have to do!)


The first gas mask plate we left without painting the back, keeping it as a glass negative, so I scanned it both with a white sheet of paper and the black back of another plate to show how it looks as both positive and negative; I am absolutely astonished and so excited by the fact that the glass plate is simultaneously positive and and negative, depending on how you view it.

Two self portraits,possibly the only photographs of myself that I've ever been happy and willing to share!

Sunflower and skull still life, we we excited to see how these would turn out, but the first plate got solarised somehow, no idea when in the process it could have happened though; the second plate came out a bit dark and still no definition in the petals of the sunflower, but never mind, I still adore them!

My still-life set up as it looked 'in the flesh' ...

We were plagued by ladybirds throughout the day, literally hundreds of them!

Finding Vivian Maier

Marquet, de Vlaminck and Derain at BMAG

I recently picked up an excellent book on Fauvism, part of the series “Movements in Modern Art” published by Methuen; it’s an excellent little tome, concise and informative, and the author of the essay and notes accompanying the plates, Denis Mathews is a deft hand at descriptive writing.
Yesterday I paid a visit to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and found the treasures above; I found it illuminating to see not only a piece painted in the Fauve style but also a piece influenced by the movement and another painted by a Fauvist after progressing away from the style.

I saw an enormous paintbrush on the way, quite apt for an afternoon observing work painted in a bold and expressive manner, with huge brushstrokes and bright colours...