Dennis Raines Ambrotype Portrait
This shot was the best out of four ambrotypes of Dennis Raines. The image is 7 x 9 inches on clear plate glass. The first shot I took was a complete disaster – the collodion just slipped right off of the glass as I developed it- SHIT!. I didn’t get the glass as clean as I should have….. I think that developing in the tray and the excessive movement seemed to work some collodion loose around the edges. On the last shot I held the plate waiter style and then poured the developer on. That and cleaning the hell out of the plate seemed to do the trick. I scanned the plate on an hp4890 flatbed scanner with the lid up. This gave me the black background necessary for the image to read as a positive.