Creating glass plate negatives
Photography practitioners today are rediscovering historical, analogue photography processes. This includes the creation of silver gelatin glass plate negatives, known as the dry plate process.
While dry plates are no longer available for sale, they can be handmade, exposed and processed similarly to photographers of the past.
Recently I had the opportunity to hand-make silver gelatin dry plate negatives with Ellie Young, an Australian expert in alternative photographic processes. Ellie shares her expertise at Gold Street Studios in Trentham, Victoria, where she operates darkrooms, workshops and an exhibition space dedicated to specialist photographic processes. I spent a day learning how to create, expose and process dry plate negatives.
We started with a piece of glass, which we prepared, coated, exposed and processed resulting in negatives ready for printing. The experience demonstrated both the camera craft required to obtain a well-focused, correctly exposed negative as well as the practical and technical knowledge needed for darkroom processing and mixing chemicals.
This image gallery illustrates the main steps in turning a piece of glass into an exposed and processed dry plate negative.
Captured on glass
Underworld
Captured on glass
It’s almost 100 years since New South Wales police used glass-plate negatives to photograph suspects in custody. These negatives are a direct link to that moment in time, and provide evidence about photographic technology and methods in the 1920s
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Channelling the police photographer
As part of a workshop with Ellie Young at Gold Street Studios in Trentham, Victoria, I had the opportunity to take my own photographs using dry glass plate negatives
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Photography with slow emulsions
Many of the Special photographs show evidence of long exposures where sitters have moved during the exposure time, causing a blur in the final image. This is probably in part due to the slow emulsions on the dry plates used to produce these photographs
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Holly Schulte
Former Curator Digital Assets
Holly explored the extraordinary potential of digital imaging technology alongside the enduring appeal of analogue photographic collections. She was responsible for a range of collection related tasks with a focus on photography, digitisation and digital asset management. Her research interests address photography, collections, image making and associated technology.
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