Well, all my chemistry has arrived now. I got my ether, my collodion, my metal salts, and my Everclear. I'm still waiting on the bits of plastic to make my silver bath, so I decided to mix my first batch of collodion. I was a bit worried after last night's exercise in torture making my varnish, but all went extremely well today. Now of course, my entire basement smells faintly of ether (and a little like my varnish as well). I'll be ready to coat a plate as soon as my silver bath parts arrive, and...

TheFlyingCamera

Now days, it's easy to buy film from China. They produce a good quality old fashionned films. You can find diffferent brand on the net at great price as Lucky, Era and Shangai. I try some of them and my favorite are GP3 100 iso and Era 100 iso. They both are quite similar to ilford, kodak or agfa traditional 100 iso
Basic exposure

With my development methods GP3 is a real 100 film. It has a classic
...

nze

Well, I got some glassware together and had my chemistry in order, so I made my varnish last night. What a pain in the ass! Gum sandarac takes forever to dissolve - I spent over an hour and a half stirring it in alcohol to get it dissolved. Of course, this also involved filtering the varnish almost a dozen times to get all the debris out - gum sandarac is a natural resin from a tree, and it gets bark and dirt and sometimes even insects trapped in it that all have to be filtered out before you...

TheFlyingCamera

This morning the postman dropped of a package. It turned out to be Christopher James book in the new second edition. I imidiatly started reading this book. This is a very inspiring book, and I am going to explore it much more in the near future. It is a book that is hard to put down again. It is so inspiring and easy to read. Only problem is finding the time to test all the things mentioned in the book. I have been flipping back and forth in the book and reading whatever seemed interesting.
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Falkenberg

Gosh, I think the biggest hurdle to starting in to wet plate is all the different places you need to order the stuff from in order to start shooting. I'll try to run down the list -

Chemistry:

www.artcraftchemicals.com (silver nitrate, cadmium bromide, ferrous sulfate, ammonium iodide, Gum Sandarac)

AND

www.chemsavers.com (ethyl ether and glacial acetic acid)

AND

www.mavidon.com (collodion)

...

TheFlyingCamera