Wet Plate Collodion as a new year card

I love ambrotypes and for this year’s new year cards I wanted to send out a proper ambrotypes on glass plates. But how can do you copy an ambrotype? I came to a conclusion that the best way would be to make a slide reproduction of a wetplate, insert the slide reproduction in an enlarger and expose a wetplate. Sort of what I was doing for a portrait of Milan Erič. Then I’ve read a post on Petapixel that my main man Tony Richards is photographing a computer screen with his wetplate camera! In wetplate community there was a WTF reaction, but I commented it, that there is a concept for every technique and for new year cards this is the perfect technique! IMacs’s screen is 30x50cm and I downsize the projected picture to the size of a plate that is about 4×5″, so no pixel can be viewed with bare eye.
Happy new year everybody!

I took a landscape image and did the following:

projected it on a computer screen. On the right is a gelatin filter to cover the screen during developing. I have a darkroom with Internet access 😉

Set my view camera

Did the wetplate ritual and here it is! From a gay landscape image into a cool wetplate in few easy steps!

The best thing is that exposure doesn’t vary much so you can do a wetplate for a specific friend!

Small marketing steps in great recession

This days my schedule got a bit loosen up, so I used the time for some marketing fine tunning. I needed new visit cards and first I wanted a visit card with a hole in the middle and an embossing, but that was just too much complicating and also quite expensive. Decided to simplify it. I wondered how much info can I strip out of visit card and on the end I decided for just a telephone number and a webaddress. My good friend Jure Kocuvan liked the idea and helped me out with typography.
This is the first – unrealized version.

Second small fine tunning I did with a help of Jure was a favicon icon on my site www.borutpeterlin.com/. It’S really difficult to make an icon that makes sense and that the message comes across in the size of 16 x 16 pix. This is the first version, but the number 5 was blending too much with background so we did a surrounding white space in a shape of a shield. I love this small almost unnoticed fine tunning, although without a question I don’t devote enough attention to them, especially on this blog.

Last but not least I have still few more new years gifts on my shelf and they are for sale @ recession prices 🙂 Small one 20 x 30 cm is for 50 EUR, panoramic picture 100 x 30 cm is for 90 EUR. Posting cost is not included, but it should not be more then 10 EUR. They are printed on archive inkjet print, plasticized and mounted on Dubond / alumount. The plastic wrapping is just for temporary protection. The plastification of the print is a standard archiving procedure, but that is not the wrapping that is seen on this pics. All inquiries on my email borutpeterlin@hotmail.com