(very) Long version:
As I mentioned in my previous post about helping with a film coating project, I took a workshop in 2014 on making gelatin dry plates at what was then the George Eastman House. It was taught by Mark Osterman, who is well known in the historic photographic process community, and his assistant, Nick Brandreth. The previous year I'd taken a workshop there in carbon printing, and while I haven't exactly adopted that process as something I do a lot, I was really hooked by the experience. So I came back the following year, learned to make my own gelatin emulsions, and absolutely fell in love with the process, both because of the results, but also because it freed me from worrying about the availability of film, and enabling me to shoot any format I wanted, up to and including ultra large format, without breaking the bank. After that, I returned year after year to take other workshops (including albumen printing, niepceotype/hyalotype, digital negatives and salted paper printing, collodion chloride printing, Lippmann plate making, and an intermediate course in gelatin dry plates. Oh, and a bunch of collodion dry plate workshops in various scenic places, but that's another post) and over time built up a fair bit of knowledge about how all these processes relate to each other. I've even had the opportunity to give a couple talks on this subject, one to the Newton Camera Club and the other to the local historical society. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm certainly an enthusiast, and can touch on all the basics.
Anyhow, while I was taking all those workshops, in the background I was working hard on really learning how to make and shoot gelatin dry plates as my main outlet for photographic creativity. It took me longer to get good at it than it should have, but some of that was because I was doing it in and amongst my fairly busy work and family life, so could only get to it in concentrated batches a few times a year. Since then, I've retired, and have been able to devote a fair bit more attention to it. As a result, my technical skills have increased accordingly. My creative skills have alas not kept track with them; I really am feeling the pressure to finally start doing some actual photography rather than always testing and learning and perfecting. But that remains a project I hope to work on this summer and fall.
In the meanwhile, Mark also retired from the museum, and started (or I should say, re-started) offering the workshops privately, taught by Mark and his wife France, both experienced photographers, particularly with wet plate collodion. At one point, I was urging him to offer the gelatin workshops again, and he brought up one he'd really enjoyed teaching at Letchworth State Park in New York, about an hour outside Rochester. It's a former large estate along a river gorge that features really spectacular scenes of the gorge and several waterfalls in it. They have some nice cabins there for rent, with a central facility with toilets and showers, so it's not full on roughing-it, but it is quiet and rustic and well set up for a bit of a getaway for about a six-person workshop. He'd run this workshop with his assistant while at the museum, but didn't think it made sense to do by himself. So I offered to help out, he accepted, and last August it actually happened.
The structure of these workshops is a day spent in Rochester learning how to make emulsions and pour plates, then three days at Letchworth shooting and developing the plates, and then a day back in Rochester looking at examples in the Eastman archive, with some travel time baked in. The division of labor is more or less: one person to take the group around to various vantage points along the gorge at the park, helping people choose their scenes (each person carries a plate holder with two plates for each outing) and consulting on exposure (the challenging part), and then returning to the camp where the other person helped them develop the plates, discuss the results, and reload their holders. We're thus able to get out the afternoon of the first day, and morning and afternoon of the second and third days which allows people to shoot as many as ten plates. I was to take the shooting role, while Mark would set up the darkroom (a blacked-out ice fishing tent with some folding tables in it and strung with safe lights -- fortunately the cabins have electricity), and France could consult and help out where needed and manage meals, etc.
I spent the summer fretting a bit about whether I was ready for this. I'd gotten to the point where I was getting fairly consistent results with my own plates, but the idea of being responsible for others' success was a bit daunting, as shooting these plates has some tricky aspects compared to shooting modern film. Its blue/UV-only sensitivity means you have to think hard about the scene you want to shoot, and the light available. Think about it: if the plate is only sensitive to blue and UV light, then anything green or warmer will be increasingly dark the warmer it gets. However, anything blue or reflecting strong sunlight will be light or even white, so getting a decent tonality requires some thought. We would be shooting in a place filled with trees (brown) and greenery (green) and rock (varying shades of black and brown) and water (varying) and sky (blue or white). As a result, "exposing for the shadows" takes on a whole new meaning. If your scene includes bright sun, sky, vegetation, rocks, and water, you're going to struggle to get the darker bits to show up adequately without blowing out the highlights. It's doable, but challenging.
On the other hand, the goal of the workshop is to send the participants home with good plates. You're both teaching them how to do it, and (hopefully) sending them home with examples they can use when trying to recreate the steps on their own. So there can be a bit of a tussle between their (usually interesting and valid!) artistic inclinations, and the goal of making only good plates. The trick is to isolate the parts of a scene that have fairly consistent lighting. You can shoot dark scenes (although it takes a lot longer) and light scenes, but you try not to mix them too much in a workshop setting. My job, as Mark put it, was to say "no" when they suggested shooting something that wasn't likely to come out. After years of doing this, he has no trouble pushing back, politely (usually
) but firmly, and of course has his reputation and experience to back him up. But it was my turn.So I went out multiple times through the summer to local state parks and the like, shooting difficult scenes and trying to develop my judgement of such, with varying amounts of success. By the time August rolled around, I thought I might be ready for it. Then the week of the workshop came, I drove to Rochester to meet the students...and then weather rolled in. Rather than the warm, somewhat humid, bright days I expected for mid-August in upstate NY, we got: cloudy, rainy, misty days with low cloud cover, and temps in the 60s and 70s (either side of 20 for those elsewhere). Oof. Challenging in a completely different way, as there simply wasn't a lot of light at all, and what there was was rather dull, and of course it was lighting rocks and water and trees. Slightly easier in that the lighting was more even, with less strong contrasts and (even worse) dappled light, but harder in that there wasn't much of it, and each exposure went way longer than I'd planned for. Some exposures were going 30 minutes or more!
So we went out on the first day, and I was sweating it, as I knew Mark was worrying a bit about how I'd handle it (he was about to find out the hard way whether I was up to teaching paying students) and I of course was anxious to get good plates for people and to come back to the developing tent to Mark's judgment on whether I'd made the right calls on scene selection and exposure. Keep in mind that exposure meters can give you a sort of starting point, but they're calibrated for panchromatic film so you have to apply your knowledge of both the plate's specific sensitivity and...reciprocity failure! Yeah, not really characterized formally for the one we were using, you just have to learn over time how to adjust. Suffice it to say, it's very difficult to overexpose this stuff, and I acted accordingly.
Well, I won't bore further with the blow-by-blow, but the summary is that I was ultimately sufficiently successful to survive the experience. I was extremely fortunate in that the participants were really lovely, having a grand time learning, open to suggestion and instruction, and very understanding of the challenging conditions and the anxiety of a new teacher. I steered them away from stuff I thought wouldn't work, found ways to accommodate some of the quirkier things they wanted to try, and in the end, practically all the plates came out well...so Mark relaxed. Once he saw that I was producing the goods, he drew me into doing a bunch of the developing work as well, and that meant he could do more one-on-one instruction with students on particular topics.
It was a tiring week -- I had to be "on" pretty much every waking hour. But I had an absolute blast doing it, loved the group, helped them make some good images, and was asked back to do it again this summer. While this is not at all intended to be an advertisement, it occurs to me to mention that the workshop will be posted soon for this coming August, and if anybody has other questions about it, you can feel free to drop me a line to ask, or ask here and I'll try to answer.
Below, I'll include some snapshots from the week -- this is a photography forum, after all.
An example of the cabins we stayed in:
The kind of scenery available in the park and the light we were getting:
An example of the results:
By Christopher:
By Jenna:
By T:
By Emma:
By Jessica:
