In the past few months we have added a new skill to the Boston Thek Imagery bag O tricks, Wet Plate Alternative Process. It has become a bit of an obsession with us here in the studio. Each evening we spend many hours racing between the studio with it’s still life set up and the darkroom.

CollodionWet Plate might be a timeless process, but there is definitely and finite amount of time for each shot. Once you have a prepared plate for the Ambrotype, you have to get it into the camera and exposed before you loose everything in the ether from which it came.

In my experience, you learn to clean glass very well in the process of learning, well…this historic process. There are many small factors that can go wrong when pouring and preparing a plate. Sagging Collodion to hot finger marks from handling, dust and improperly cleaned glass to not letting the Collodion dry long enough thus causing the image to peel from the plate.

Then there are no guarantees once you’ve taken the shot. Will the image be properly exposed? Will you miss a spot with the developer? The fearful questions are endless but so is the excitement of producing a perfect plate.

This process is an enigma, it certainly has a mind of it’s own….

With all that said…here is my best result to date. A still life of snowdrops I plucked along my way through the thawing fields around my town.

We will continue to keep adding to our photographic bag of tricks.