A few still life images made with the wet collodion process. I find that wet collodion is a really good process for still life; as well as being well-suited to working in a home studio, it renders texture really nicely and the irregular borders add interest.
Wet collodion is a Victorian photographic process, first suggested by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. Collodion (gun cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol) is salted with cadmium bromide and flowed onto a glass or a blackened metal plate. When the collodion has set, the plate is sensitised in a bath of silver nitrate, placed in the plate holder of a view camera and exposed while still wet. After brief development in an iron-based developer and fixing (traditionally in potassium cyanide, although modern ammonium thiosulphate fixers do the job) the plate is washed, dried and varnished. If the image is made on glass, the reverse is painted black to give a positive image. ...
Two of the robots pictured here were created by researchers at the University of Sheffield. AnTon, made by Dr. Robin Hofe, is an animatronic speaking robot that is used to study the mechanisms of speech production. eMo, made by Prof. Noel Sharkey, is capable of sensing its environment and displaying emotions. The images are clear glass ambrotypes, made by the wet collodion process.
The LEGO lockdown camera was conceived as a way of representing the strangeness of the Covid-19 lockdown. As I write we’ve spent 40 days inside, with occasional forays to the shops or for dog walks. I had intended to get this finished for World Pinhole Day, which was last weekend, but didn’t quite get it together on time. The LEGO lockdown camera is basically a camera obscura. I added a viewing portal through which the lens of a digital camera can look (I used a Fuji X30 with macro mode enabled). So, in the same way that you could turn a room into a camera obscura by blacking out the windows and photographing the inside, you can photograph the inside of this camera and its little LEGO family. Whatever the pinhole is pointed at is projected onto the walls of their tiny room. ...
I’m writing this in April 2020, while the world is locked down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s World Pinhole Day today, 26th April, and I wanted to do something to represent the strangeness of the last few weeks, which have been spent at home with only occasional forays outside. I decided to make a camera specifically for the event, rather than using one of the many pinhole cameras that I already have. Baked beans have been in short supply during the lockdown, with many people panic-buying tinned food, so I liked the idea of getting “full use” from the baked bean cans I had. So I sprayed an empty can stealth black, and added a laser-cut pinhole which I found in a box of junk and happened to be about the right size for the focal length. The camera has a focal length of 70mm and a pinhole diameter of 0.3mm, giving an aperture of f/235. A card lid was added to make it light-tight. ...