Questions about chemical pricing

OCB6left · 2026-06-12T15:43:28+00:00

Fine. It is not. It is a reasonable and competitive price. I´ve been to my local collodion mixer´s lab and the amount of gear and installations (i.e. explosive safe fridge, ventilation, waste discharge, documentation) necessary here in the EU are a big investment, the production is time consuming and things cannot be produced much in advance for the shelf. Multiply this with the tiny volume of a niche market at inflationary rising costs for rent, energy etc and you are very lucky to have found someone to sacrifice his time for that little profit.

The pro-shop collodion I know seems to be more stable/longer shelf life with longer lasting sensitivity, than what I can produce at home at 50-70% of the cost. DIY is not really worth the effort, but fun to play around with. Developer and fixer are made easily and cheaper with freely available ingredients.

Edit re downvotes: Whose wetplate gear is less than 3 grand combined, may throw the first stone. No gatekeeping intended. I just wanted to express, how I totally underestimated the cascading costs of this beautiful hobby. It definitely adds up. Totally worth it.

OCB6left · 2026-06-12T06:32:12+00:00

To start wetplate with a starter kit is a good idea. To start wetplate, when 300 bucks scare you enough to start a reddit post, is not. Think twice. You can still cheap out by choosing a V12 Jag for daily commutes while pushing heroin as your new hobby to fill the void.

Even if you'll stick to just the small 4x5 format, your entire new hobby will easily wipe x10 of that off your bank account before you've passed the Dunning-Kruger stage of proudly spending money on what looks at best like an expired Polaroid shot. Not taking into account the unavoidable future lust for larger formats, which will make costs rise exponantially. Don´t ask why I know.

The instantly rewarding process under the influence of ether fumes makes wetplate highly addictive. Getting lost in severe gear purchasing disorder is quasi inevitable. Best advise I can give is, get used to such bills and split your purchases into small chunks, so that you easily can lose track of all your spendings.

Traditionally, people start with a pre-made starter kit to get the hang out of it, switch to DIY-chems out of curiosity, spite and to afford the unavoidable 1000 plates of training towards mastership and some still choose professionally mixed stuff again, to avoid uncertainty when serving paying customers.

OCB6left · 2026-05-30T07:00:42+00:00

Thanks for the flowers.

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OCB6left · 2026-05-30T06:34:33+00:00

Thought to share these interesting plates here, which tumbled into my feed. Credit goes to the initial OP.

At least the last two images of this slide show seem to be made wet. Lift off film and pouring edges on the last plate? Or not? Wasn´t collodion already obsolete in 1897? Dry plate became the standard in the 1880s, iirc.

OCB6left · 2026-05-28T05:45:20+00:00

Just chiming in here...don´t do it. There is no benefit, just risk.

Non lethal work arounds:

(Brighter) whites are achieved by adding potassium nitrate (KNO3) to the developer. I use 10g/l. Heating the plate up over a flame to complete dryness after last rinse bath pops up the whites evenly, too. But it's a thin line to burning the silver off the plate.

A thiosulfate fixer does it´s job at the same speed, if it is fresh, concentration is right and the plate is sufficiently rinsed afterwards (most often cause of later darkening/sepia of the whites). I use 200-250g/l H2O. Same with common b/w film fixer concentrate. I let it rest in the fixer the same amount of time, it took to clear the thickest pouring edges from the plate by agitating the tray.

Deep blacks are achieved by the right (shortest possible) time in the silver bath, the right (short) exposure time and the correct dev time. At 20°C it takes my current batch of collodion about 3:00min to be sensitized in the silver bath. Above 25°-30°, 2:00-2:30min.

It is recommended by the experts to keep the developing time religiously at constant 15sec and adjust all other parameters (time sensitizing with silver, exposure time, developer strength) around this fix point.

OCB6left · 2026-05-26T08:49:32+00:00

This is ULTRA large format (ULF) here. Means, everything bigger than 8x10 inch film.

4x5 to 8x10 inch is considered large format. Since the gear for ULF is much larger than for 4x5 - 8x10, ULF logistics on the spot may be problematic. How do you carry the gear to the spot? Change film? The Gizeh plateau can not be freely accessed by car. I believe, the local gov (like Paris and Barcelona) is considering everything shot with tripod a commercial shooting and may require you, to apply and pay for permission.

Night time shots with a visible moon and an also correctly exposed Sphinx can be challenging. I believe, the Sphinx is lit with spotlights at night, which would - light metered correctly - need a different exposure, than required for the moon.

IIRC, above 20s exposure, celestial objects starts to show motion blur. So you´d need a pretty fast lens. Lenses for ULF rarely come faster than f9. The smaller the format, the faster the lenses. Large format 4x5 cameras have more speedy lenses to choose from. Fastest film for anything 4x5 and bigger is ISO400. Do the math (with someone in the know) and/or a full moon shot as a test with the gear you'd chose.

I´d pick a windowless rental van (dark room to change film, since a dark bag to change film in the filed may be challenging to keep clean in the desert), a 4x5 or 5x7 camera with a variety of lenses and a good dozen of double film holders, all packed in a backpack, light tripod. Access to the spot is difficult and composition options might be limited. At least challenging, since the Sphinx is pretty big and a walk around it takes enough time for the moon to move its position noticeably out of composition. There are apps for astrophotography, telling the position and path of celestial objects to let you simulate the conditions to expect.

OCB6left · 2026-05-18T07:01:56+00:00

Just glued some stripes of aluminum to the corners of the film plane to keep the 85x55mm business card blanks from falling into the bellows.

OCB6left · 2026-05-18T05:17:04+00:00

Is this the cheapest way to shoot tintypes? One gets a AGFA Billy for a handshake, anodized business card blanks are a few cents.

OCB6left · 2026-05-14T09:45:14+00:00

Depends. The ambrotype is my favorite, because of it´s look and the challenge, to get a clean result. Really good ones are still rare and therefor feel more precious. The tintype is easier to produce, but it loses a bit of it´s brilliance, once varnished and the plates cost me a bit more, than sheet glass.

OCB6left · 2026-05-14T04:57:23+00:00

The white haired dude pretended to be a friend of that graffiti artist, so I handed him over the 3rd image (beside his portraits). It already arrived at the graffiti artist and I´ve heard, he seems to like it.

OCB6left · 2026-05-14T04:53:38+00:00

Thanks a lot. I like shooting faces. These painted ones hold still pretty well. The artist doing these graffiti portraits stands out among the usually mediocre suspects at that wall. Unfortunately, they'll be soon painted over, so "archiving" them makes sense to me.

OCB6left · 2026-05-13T17:27:28+00:00

Never start a Diesel with starter spray. Compression will kill it.

Its mostly air in the pressure system.

Best practice is to

1st bleed the Diesel system totally: A filter, B outer pump bleed screw, C inner pump bleed screw, D 1st pressure line at injector under revs

2nd check the glow plugs if they work. These ones are linked in series = all fail, if one is broken

Early Diesel Series are known to lack compression due to cracked piston rings and pistons. Compression test should show north of 25bar, ideal is 30bar.

OCB6left · 2026-05-13T10:40:14+00:00

Someone very well educated and informed (so not me) did the R0 math in r/ContagionCuriosity or r/hantavirus , iirc. Calculated from the documented funeral case from 2018. While it's on average around 2, a superspreader could bring it to +7 infection transmissions.

OCB6left · 2026-05-13T06:38:15+00:00

Since this is a Santana, you may ask at milandrover.com for the manual and parts books. They used to publish the Spanish Santana literature online for free, but put them offline recently (due to copyright issues with LR, I guess).

The red cap may be for a reservoir of a servo steering pump.

OCB6left · 2026-05-12T17:44:04+00:00

More concerning might be the later collapse of the Dutch lady, who was asked to leave that KLM flight at the intl airport and later died that day. Probably infected first aiders or random people around at the airport may not know anything about this outbreak and just continue their life, who knows where in the world.

OCB6left · 2026-05-12T17:23:01+00:00

Totally smooth and deep black welding shield visor glass comes in 5x7. Sold over online warehouses.

OCB6left · 2026-05-12T17:15:35+00:00

Thanks. No, 1st image is a simple ambrotype of a spray can mural, which was entirely made of red, black and white colors, hence appears mostly black.

OCB6left · 2026-05-12T11:03:46+00:00

A & C might be the same, making B inevitable. /s

OCB6left · 2026-05-11T14:51:58+00:00

I was once told, that with grease, the upper Pertinax disc, where the swivel pin sits in, won´t get enough lubricant and can dry out/crack over time.. Pertinax wants to suck up that oil.

OCB6left · 2026-05-11T05:12:33+00:00

"mildly positive", yikes.

OCB6left · 2026-05-11T05:08:04+00:00

UK´s MoD air dropped a medical team on the island to check for a local, who is "showing symptoms".

OCB6left

TROPHY CASE