Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
This is not about a technical perfect wet plate. This is about building connections from thousand miles away. Overcoming obstacles and being there for each other.
This 5-minute exposure captured more than just an image, it’s a short movie where the plate captured our thoughts and movements. Thanks to Shane Balkowitsch to be a part of it.
“Watch the Birdie” – that’s what my parents told me, to make sure I look into the camera before they took a photo of me. I guess lots of you guys remember this saying. With the renovation of a 140-year-old historic brass birdie, I show you the origin of this phrase.
The task was clear – an original portrait of a Medieval Knight Sword Fighter (national champion).
So I planned to do a collodion wet plate of a knight with his armour and sword. My first thought was, that an original armor has no “color” so to say. You just see the reflections of the environment. That was the reason I wanted to shoot the first portrait in my garden. Unfortunately, the weather gods were against us and just after when we started a thunderstorm was on its way.
There is no doubt that the current coronavirus situation is affecting the lives of much of the world’s population. Events are being cancelled, schools closed, people are “self-isolating” and entire countries have been locked down. It seems like nobody can escape its effects anywhere. How we respond to those effects, though, is often quite personal.
For wet plate photographer, Markus Hofstätter, the response is to make art. It’s how he responds a lot of things that bother him or affect his life in a meaningful way. Naturally, his preferred medium is wet plate photography. But Markus went a little further than normal with this shooting seven separate images, which he turned into the stop motion animation you see above.
Austrian photographer Markus Hofstätter has shared a few of his impressive projects with DIYP so far. His latest project is as always ambitious, unusual, time-consuming, and totally worth the effort.
While walking around a flea market, Markus found a huge 500mm Petzval lens, produced around 1860. It was in a pretty bad condition, but Markus had an idea. He bought this rare gem, restored it, and took some fantastic portraits with it.
These days, if you want to shoot large format, you might have difficulty finding replacement parts. Large format cameras aren’t exactly as common as they used to be, and there aren’t many companies making spare parts for older ones these days, or creating custom pieces for odd-sized cameras.
In this video, though, photographer Markus Hofstätter walks us through how we can make our own ground glass focusing screens at whatever size we need.
Although the darkroom isn’t quite as common as it once was, it seems to be gaining a resurgence of late. Every day I see people buying and selling darkroom equipment in Facebook groups and various online classifies. But a lot of the older electronics kit just doesn’t work anymore, and repairing it isn’t always easy, or even possible.
But, now we have plenty of other options to replace some of those electronic items, even if they need to be modified. Ikea’s Klockis, for example, is potentially an ideal little darkroom timer, but it needs modifications in order to make it safe. In this video, photographer Markus Hofstätter shows us how he modified his Klockis for use in the darkroom.
While it was once the only way you could really shoot a photo, wet plate photography went off almost into the realm of complete non-existence just a few years ago. Lately, though, it seems to be making something of a comeback. Much of the hardware isn’t as easy to get as it once was, although it seems to be more popular again now than it has been for a very long time.
One problem to be overcome with wet plate, though, is actually loading the plates into a large format camera. You typically can’t just use a regular sheet film holder. At least, not without alteration. In this video, photographer Markus Hofstätter shows us how he modifies his 8×10 film holders for the wet plate process.
Some time ago I did a project together with Mathieu Stern. Back then, we communicated via Skype. Because of that, I was super happy to hear, that I would finally get to meet him in person.
This visit was for a portrait shooting on a collodion wet plate and we did also a short wet plate workshop. After the videos from Mathieu and myself, you can see all the pictures and read more about the shootings
Austrian photographer Markus Hofstätter has published plenty of interesting wet plate projects. In his latest project, he brings together large format wet plates and stereo 3D photos. This was Markus’ most time-consuming project so far. It took him working six months to finish it, the first three just modifying his camera so it can take stereographic images. But judging from the results – it was well worth it.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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