I Built the Largest Natural Light Wet Plate Studio in the US in Over a Century | Hacker News Reader

I Built the Largest Natural Light Wet Plate Studio in the US in Over a Century

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159 pointswallflower58 comments

Honestly, this seems a tad self-aggrandizing. I've done wet plate before, you can learn it in an afternoon, it's really not that hard. If you can't find someone to teach you there are books like The Keepers of Light that have the formulations and processes all laid out, so learning by yourself isn't that hard either. The tricky part is getting hold of some of the chemistry, but that's not as hard as it used to be either. The issue with wet plate processes is that it's kind of finicky and there's a lot of experimentation that has to happen before you get it down, but getting from 0 to your first one shouldn't take 45 days if you really want to do it. Not hard, it just takes time, and money.

As for there only being 1000 people who practice this, well, that's just not true. I personally know at least 3 photographers in the SF Bay Area who do it, and I know of at least another 6 in the same area (just don't know them personally). It's actually become a quite popular thing to do.

Good for him building a studio and all, and for doing something he really enjoys, but some of these claims are just not right.

‘Self-aggrandizing’ could describe numerous accomplishments contemporary wet plate photographers have made, and documented on the internet. Maybe the particular practice just seems to attract a certain crowd. Preserving the process and such is interesting and educational, but how much? Aside from technical and practical considerations, I’ve never really understood the intrigue, and I shoot photos on emulsion on a regular basis in 2018. I have reasons and vulnerability about that, though, which would crumble if I were trying to justify these wet-plate feats.

Honestly, if you're doing it in an 1800sqft studio custom built for exactly that process, it's not that hard. I spent a weekend doing it in what was essentially a 50sqft bathroom and it was pretty straight forward, once you get the hang of it. They used to do it in tents in the middle of the desert on giant, heavy plates of glass (16in X 20 in), so this is a piece of cake in comparison.

There are photographic artists doing much more complex work, in much more difficult conditions. Check out the work of Chris McCaw and John Chiara, or the recent daguerreotype work of Binh Danh. Not criticizing anyone, just saying that the way they choose to do things is absolutely crucial to their art, and an essential part of it, not just a process that is currently cool.

There's an interesting idea in this article around how with the increase in convenience that technology brings, we don't realize that something else gets lost. If you can only take one photo and know that it will be hours of work to even find out if it was any good, you're going to invest a lot of time trying to make sure that photo is perfect. You're going to pour your skill and passion into that one photo. Would you do the same when you're taking 200 shots?

Last night my phone's charge cable stopped working and my phone battery was dead. I had to get to a mall 20 minutes drive away without GPS in a city I've never been to before. I realized that in the last decade, I've never once had to navigate, ever. I've used the GPS as a technology crutch for so long that my skill has atrophied, maybe. I made it, thankfully, but I haven't been nervous like that when diving in a long time.

The whole experience has left me wondering just what else I don't know I might have lost because of all the technology around me.

>Last night my phone's charge cable stopped working and my phone battery was dead. I had to get to a mall 20 minutes drive away without GPS in a city I've never been to before.

If you are staying at a hotel, ask at the reception, most hotels do provide nowadays charging cables/adpters as a service.

In some cases you might even be given one (used of course) for free, it seems like nowadays charging cables/adapters are the most forgotten items (very rarely asked for) by travelers, and they end up in the "unclaimed items" cupboard.

Hotels also used to provide free paper maps of the local area :-)

I know this isn't point, but a lot of gas stations sell charging cables.

A lot of gas stations also have people who can help with directions! :)

It was true thirty years ago when I first said it, still true today: never ask locals for directions. First, you’d be surprised how many people don’t know their own city. Second, if they do know the city, they’ll leave out a lot of assumptions. Like “turn left where the old church used to be”. Personal experience says you’re going to be at best 50/50 on getting useful information.

Source: my motorcycle has been a lot of places over the years.

They used to, before GPS. Now the gas station employee is likely to be just as clueless without a phone giving directions.

If the parent is a guy, he probably wouldn’t ask.

I’ll print out maps prior to business trips. Does anyone still print backup transparencies?

I still keep a paper atlas in the car of the entire US. Batteries, entire phones die. Cell signal is not ubiquitous.

When I was a kid my dad would occasionally get lost when we were driving to some other town – usually to pick something up, I'd reluctantly tag along as the carrying help – and every so often he'd stop by the side of the road and ask me to pull out the atlas. Then he'd sit there, figure out where we were, figure out how to get to where we were going, or to the next waypoint, then give me instructions to read out where to go. "Next right, straight for about 10 miles then there's a dirt road on the left" – that sort of thing.

Those were good drives. No distractions, other than farm houses and the occasional cow or horse.

Yes, I too have a paper atlas (EU) in the glovebox, there is something in online/navigator maps that somehow prevents me from having a "general idea" of the whereabouts, when you zoom out you often lose details, and at least for me it is confusing whilst with the paper map I find it easier to orientate myself.

BTW I also have a spare charging cable/adapter for the car, actually I have one of those "generic" octopus like cables that fit most phones, with a USB A plug on the other end and the 12 V to 5 V adapter, the cable can be used also to charge from a USB port of a computer or from a "generic" charger with a USB receptacle.

Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear has a tip I found really useful: set the navigation device so north is up, "you'll never get lost again" (he exaggerates a lot).

Yes, that's Jeremy Clarkson, of course he exaggerates, but my issue is not much about "orientation", but rather with the zoom level (on a tiny device), maybe the actual colours/contrast/backlight/glare, I seem to "lose" the actual main road because a secundary one at a different zoom level seems "prevailing".

Or maybe it is just my poor eyesight, I sometimes need to take my spectacles off to see the details on a smartphone at close distance, yet I don't (yet) need reading glasses (at least not for printed paper).

Agreed. My wife makes me ask when technology fails and I want to trust my Boy Scout instincts.

When I dropped my 6S+ iPhone (battery!) off at the Apple store, they informed me they were going to keep it overnight. Having recently moved to the city, I had a very unsettling feeling of not really understanding how I was going to get home ... or, how I was going to get back to the Apple store the next day!

I spent a fair bit of time fumbling around side streets before making the various necessary highway connections, and in the end decided I knew where I was more than I'd expected. The next day I was able to "read" the terrain to make the necessary turns to ultimately end up at the Apple store. I felt like I'd passed some kind of exam.

Maybe folks don't remember the old map books with indexed pages that you could buy at any gas station? None to be found any more. That's ok with me.

We had something similiar in our holiday 7 years ago when roaming wasn't that cheap. I hatted it.

There was no fun in finding out where we are. I'm not going on holiday to look for streetsigns when driving on a autobahn/highway a little bit stressed out when my goal is the goal and not the way.

For a "Natural Light" studio I'm seeing a lot of lamps there...

That aside I needed to keep reminding myself as I read the article that this is about photography as art, aping the style of old photographs. But those old photos don't necessarily look the way they do because the photographers of that time were after a certain aesthetic, they were simply the best photographs it was possible to make at that time.

Their aesthetic was shaped by the tools they had

A lot of effort and resources go into reproducing the sound of music recordings from, say, the 1960s -- even though the music producers in the 1960s would probably have loved to have had today's technology instead!

That was what I was trying to get across. This yearning and fetishization of "simpler" times and ways of doing things, as though there is something inherently noble and valuable about these practices, purely because they are historical.

And yet there won't quite ever be a Beatles or an Elvis again, will there?

It can be very hard to beat the zietgiest of an age at their own game. There is something special in that, which we try to measure up to, but still can't quite reproduce exactly even with better technology.

Will there ever be a eugene atget or a walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange that beat them at their own game?

Until you provide some criteria that would allow us to evaluate "beat them at their own game" for a particular body of photographs …

Eugene Atget or Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange were doing their thing in their now -- so beating them at their own game would be doing your thing in your now.

great, we're all in agreement.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

-- Brian Eno

"By being slower and having to follow a very strict set of rules to make an image, you find a way to work around the limitations of the process and the process pays you back, tenfold."

This effect comes up all the time when I'm learning about great projects or people in history - creativity that arises in the face of limitation.

For example, the rock climber Pamela Shanti Pack developed a condition that made it painful for her to grip, which eventually pushed her toward crack climbing, and offwidth climbing in particular. She has since made a name for herself with first ascents of some of the hardest offwidths ever climbed.

I don't often see limitations self-imposed like this, though.

On the contrary, I see artists choosing self-imposed limitations constantly. I do it myself, in whatever form I'm working in. As an example, a band I'm in sometimes plays "White Christmas", one of my favorite melodies. When I play the guitar solo, I have a simple rule for myself - I have to play the melody. Everything else can change. So instead of improvising melody, I'm improvising tone and expression. It gets great results. Other times, I might set a little rule for myself like "I have to play this solo using only these four notes".

Narrowing the range of choices through self-imposed limitations makes creative decision-making easier and more focused.

I get it as a photographer, too. Sometimes, I'll restrict myself to a single lens. Or I'll deliberately shoot film rather than digital, and limit myself to one or two rolls. It forces me to be more considered in my approach. I totally understand the wet plate thing.

Aw, he didn't put his studio on a turntable to follow the sun, like Edison did.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison%27s_Black_Maria

Somewhat related. I was surprise to find that building in Tokyo Open Air Museum. http://digitalmuseum.rekibun.or.jp/app/structure/detail?id=s...

> Since lighting equipment for photography was not fully developed in those days, frosted glass was used for the second-floor windows on the north side of the studio for lighting purposes.

I've been there in the rainy day and even then I'd say light was quite OK. I don't know a lot about photography but it was very interesting to see how people solved these problems back in the day.

  5 years ago, I didn’t own a camera and knew nothing about
  photography. I saw a wet plate online and I was immediately 
  drawn to it, and thus my journey began.

  I was told early on that there was no way a non-photographer
  who has never owned a camera can figure out this archaic
  process from 1848. 45 days after that conversation, I had
  made my very first wet plate photo.

He may have been an amateur, but he appears to have had a significant number of resources at his disposal to get started. I can't help but feel like he left out a huge part of the story.

Also quoting yourself on the door to your studio?

I don't really like the tone of "they said it couldn't be done, but I did it". When you don't have a day job and you have resources you can throw at an alternative process, it's not at all impossible to do good work. If you're trying to get by with rudimentary equipment and can't afford the time and money to experiment and learn how to get it right, then the task becomes more difficult.

Wet plate is a known quantity, with instructions online, workshops available, and suppliers are still in business.

He's doing some good work. If he were producing Autochromes or Lippman plates, I'd be more impressed. Those processes are almost lost, with a few successful experimenters only.

Edited: for tone

I wish we could diagnose this as a mild case of narcissism (maybe just unfounded smugness) and not be scratching our heads about what is going on with this guy.

Not really. He had a very successful ecommerce business[0], so he had some money to spend on his new hobby, which is a non trivial point I suppose, but as far as I can tell he picked up photography for the first time in his 40's.

[0] https://www.balkowitsch.com

Sounds like he followed Phil Greenspun's instructions [1]!

"The Easy Way

Step 1: Read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

Step 2: With your new $250/hour skills, build a database-backed Web service for a Fortune 500 company.

Step 3: Take the money collected in Step 2 and purchase a couple of Canon or Nikon bodies and every lens in the respective manufacturer's product line.

The only problem with this approach is that, once you've got a cabinet filled with lenses, you still have to figure out which to take out for a particular project and how to use it effectively. If you're rich, read "get" in the following headlines to mean "take out of cabinet". If you're not rich, read "get" to mean "buy from one of the photo.net recommended retailers"."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030401081311/http://www.photo....

Most major metros have camera lens rentals that let you get access to glass that would normally be out of reach.

Renting a 200mm F2 was a blast since it's a very specific lens that I could never afford but was amazing to see what was possible with it.

>Also quoting yourself on the door to your studio?

I took that to mean he expects the studio to outlast him. The plaque serves as a way to communicate his intentions for the studio to those that will inherit it.

I took it to mean he was doing the old-timey thing of putting up a plaque saying the name of the business, a slogan, and the proprietor. (In commerce, quote marks tend to indicate emphasis or a slogan.)

That's how I read it too. Maybe a bit presumptuous to add such a plaque right away and not, say, as a clause in a will or something – the building might be gone in five years, after all. But I didn't really read it as self aggrandizing.

In context with the content and tone of the post, it reads as self-aggrandizement—a seemingly not uncommon affectation among those who have attained notoriety in their own lifetime.

And while one might regard it as distasteful—it’s certainly tiresome, in my experience— there’s material and psychological benefits to holding that mindset (along with a variety of non-trivial downsides.)

How does he expect a building that flimsy to last particularly long?

Wow, I had misread his quote as,

"Learn everything about modern photography outside this door."

Kind of like that better. ;)

I was at an exhibit of natural light wet plate work recently and got to chat with the artist. Really interesting stuff.

So many parts of the process are inexact and difficult to measure that you never really know what is going to happen on the other end. For him it was a challenge to try to reach perfection while appreciating the imperfections that arise along the way. Uneven light, slipped emulsion, bubbles, all added to the final piece.

It seemed you really had to dedicate yourself to this one art form if you were going to produce anything worthwhile. Not for the recreational photographer.

Pretty creative

Shame about the photos though

Alternative headline: "rich guy builds a house for his hipster hobby"

But in only five years, he was able to go from knowing nothing about photography, to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on it!

If you want lots of natural light, why the heck would you live in North Dakota? Why not Arizona or New Mexico??

OT: Dude looks like Eugene Victor Tooms! Compare https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/01/8-23-17_2-800x6... vs https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/x-files/images/0/0b/Euge...

Not seeing it at all.

Am I the only one that was led to believe by the title that it took him a century to build the studio?

Probably not. The question is, what does the prepositional phrase modify: "largest" or "built." You took it to modify "built." There's no syntactical requirement that it modify one or the other, that I'm aware of. The choice must be based on meaning and interpretation. Few, if any, can take over a century to build anything, so modifying "largest" is more reasonable.

Prior to this, I had no clue whatsoever about wet plate photography, I did not know it existed, and I did not know the name.

So to me the headline was very confusing - when I hear plate, I think of tableware first. The association I had was like an art exhibit of wet tableware.

I have to admit I am a little disappointed that the actual content of the article was far less weird than I had expected.

I think that would be an odd way to read it. It's an idiom, I guess.

"It is the most significant archaeological find in 50 years" = It is the most significant archaeological find among archaeological finds of the last 50 years

Your example is clear, this title ... less so if you read in a hurry. And yes, I did read TFA and I know it only took him 5 years :)

I think you might be. The "in" at the end makes it pretty unambiguous.

Maybe. I dont read the title how you do.

Step 1: Build wet plate studio

Step 2: Take pictures that are creepy af.

Step 3: Profit.

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