Maximilian Zeitler – handmade photography

Knowledge about collodion and historical processes

Explanations, recipes and experience from more than ten years of working with the wet plate, for the curious, beginners and everyone who pours their own plates.

Ambrotype portrait, 40x50cm, held in two hands Basics The wet collodion process The wet collodion process is a photographic process from 1851. A glass or metal plate is coated with collodion, made light-sensitive in a silver bath, exposed while still wet and developed immediately. Every image is one of a kind. Read

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Technical articles

Guides and background from the studio
Chemistry  Silver bath series, part 2 of 2 Silver bath maintenance for collodion wetplates part 2 Part 2 of the series discusses routine maintenance for silver nitrate baths used in collodion wetplate photography. Regular maintenance is influenced by plate size and quantity. Key methods include sunning the bath to remove contaminants and filtering the solution. The importance of pH balance and checking solution integrity is also emphasized. Chemistry  Beginner  Silver bath series, part 1 of 2 Silver bath maintenance for collodion wetplates part 1 This is the first part of my blog series for silver bath maintenance. In this part, the basics are described and focusses for beginning practitioners of collodion wetplate photography. How silver and light form a photograph In the 1830ies, a new era began as many chemists found different ways to capture the environment with silver and light. A camera obscura was used to collect the light of an object through a lens and concentrate the rays of light on photosensitive material. Here is a very low-level approach to explain how a Making albumen paper In the 1850ies, the french photographer Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard developed a new printing method based on silverchlorides: the albumen paper process. Here is a short summary about making albumen paper. This is just a brief step by step introduction pf this process. Building a UV exposure box I built a UV exposure box for alternative processes like albumen or salt printing with florescent tubes and some wiring. Ultra Large Format Ambrotypes Since I started practising the wet plate collodion process, it was my dream to create big plates – ultra large format ambrotypes.

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