Wet Plate problems with un-pure AgNO3

Maja Smrekar, an artist portrayed for Mladina weekly.

Unfortunately I’m making this portraits on no-budget and I don’t have a studio access in Ljubljana so I improvise. This portrait we’ve done in a Tivoli park. Unfortunately you can’t see the full set up, since I clean it up already when I took this photograph, but you can imagine me lying on the ground and Maja leaning over me. Flash with a softbox was illuminating her.

Recently I’ve bought 200g of AgNO3 on ebay and on Saturday everything worked fine, then I mixed new solution and added to the old solution and suddenly I couldn’t make a decent picture! On Sunday I was making a portrait of an artist Maja Smrekar, who mixed her genome with an enzyme that is making yoghurt and my idea was to make a portrait of her as a scientist / alchemist. Perfect motif in a wet plate collodion technique, but I was getting only fog! Luckily I still know how to shoot digital

On the bottom of this post there is a test plate and clearly it’s a silver bath problem. I was pounding my head what could go wrong and I was testing everything, although I knew it’s a silver bath issue. On Friday I had a commission to do a family wet plate portrait and I’ve told them I could do it only on film and digital, but on Friday I’ve woke up at 3:30 am with an idea to make the last attempt in saving my poor wet plate soul. I’ve put my AgNO3 solution on a cooker and boiled it, so 80% of the solution would evaporate. I woke up at 6am and 99% of solution evaporated. I wondered if I ruined the solution, but after adding new fresh distilled water and filter it, everything was working fine. I was starting to get lovely clean plates again and I’ve done the commission also with wet plate technique.

After I published the experience on FB, the legend of 19th Century photography techniques, Mark Osterman of Eastman Kodak museum warn me and I’m passing his words: “Be careful boiling down to dry crystals. They are difficult to dissolve and if there is any trace of ammonia you’ll have fulminate of silver…. a percussive explosive. :-0″

This is my best result of a wet plate portrait of Maja, after an hour and a half of trying…

This is a test plate with stripes of exposure times and clearly it’s a silver bath problem. Obviously the new purchased silver nitrate was not 99% pure!

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