Deborah Butterfield
Deborah Butterfield is an american sculptor who creates life size horses from found materials and cast bronze tree branches and limbs. The Large horses are one solid piece of bronze and are painted so the wood looks very natural. I have seen these horses being installed at the gallery and they are extremely heavy. I had the opportunity to photograph Deborah at her opening at Greg Kucera and I set up behind the gallery with my “portable” darkroom setup.
Here is the one shot of Deborah. It is an 11 x 14 collodion negative scan. I will be printing the negative later.
f4.5 for 4 seconds
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11 x 14 wet plate back For the Deardorff Studio
So I have built a wet plate back for the 8 x 10 Century master studio camera.
I learned a lot on that project and set out to make a back for my Deardorff 11 x 14. The camera came with a spring back so I wanted to use this back as the focusing back instead of making a separate focusing back for the new plate holder. Other than being much bigger, the project went pretty smoothly and the back works very well. The one thing that needs to change is the galvanized darkslide really reacts with any silver nitrate that comes in contact with it. The mild steel on my century back reacts less and works much better. I will change that out soon enough. I made plexiglass reducing inserts for 8 x 10 and 5 x 7.
Chris and Chauney
Chris Engman asked if I would shoot some plates at his wedding reception a while back. They actually eloped in a small airplane in flight way before but wanted to have a reception to satisfy the family. Weddings and large bulky cameras with complicated processes don’t mix but thought it would be a great experience so I said yes. The location required a dark place to sensitize the plates so I set up a darkroom in the bathroom at Chauney’s uncles gallery in Fremont. I used the Century master studio camera on a rolling stand and the Bausch and Lomb 400mm f4.5. There was an alley next to the gallery that was a perfect place to shoot without any traffic. The weather was typical Seattle, heavy overcast with the occasional light sprinkle. The exposures outside were all shot at f4.5 at two seconds.
I did shoot a couple of smaller plates inside the gallery at 8 seconds.
