this is a bit aside, but i am quite interested in older or alternative means of photography, and have come across several recipies for the manufacture of both dry and wet plates, from what i have seen most plates used in WWI were dry plates, but i could be mistaken as you do see decent shutter speeds on some. earlier in the war you see slower dry films, then technology allowed for faster ones. for me the most interesting is either the lumiere or the russian system (i cant remember the inventors name) the lumiere involves colored starch grains overlayed, the colors are orange, green and blue, and they are mixed so that the mixture is a neutral color, then placed on a seperate glass plate, to be put over the emulsion, with potash (ash basicly) filling in the spaces between grains, and you put a panchromatic emulsion under it, the idea being that the filtered color registers on the panchromatic emulsion, this means that if you were to take the starch part away youd have a normal black and white picture, but with the filter you get a full color picture, now i havent been able to find panchromatic emulsion recipies, infact it seems they didnt have panchromatic film until right around 1900, anyway its impossible for me to totaly recreate it, i cant make the emulsion, and the starch grains were refined scientificly to be a certain average width and then under extreme pressure and using methods which even modern science is having trouble replicating, put the potash between the grains, and then apply it to the emulsion then after taking the picture turn it into a slide. so, my plan is to use 3 colors of plastic, orange green and blue as close to the original coloring as i can, sand them with fine sand paper until i have a very soft powder made out of each, then slowly melt them together so that i have a clear and neutraly colored sheet of translucent plastic, then ill take a normal peice of panchromatic film (panchromatic means it responds to all wavelenghts of light, older emulsions arent as sensative to red, and further back to say wet plate or deguerrotype they are even insinsitive to green light, or maybe its blue i cant remember, basicly almost all modern flim is pancrhomatic aside from a few special ones for use in dark rooms) say tri-x or tmax (my prefered) and put it behind the plate in its normal film holder (or a plate holder, a plate holder might work better its going to have to be 4x5 or larger anyway so it dosent realy matter if its in a plate or cut film holder as long as it has plenty of space) then take the picture, you could even use the plastic as a normal filter placing it in in place of the dark slide right before you take the picture, and then using it as a filter later after you develop the film. i will post scans after ive experimented with this and get college studio access again. the next is the russian system (i know you know which one) that involved taking plate pictures with 3 colored filters, then recombining them after adding their color back. again it has to be panchromatic, but in this case you should be able to use a normal filter over the lens, i was thinking that in this way you could build a camera that could take 3 6x6 images on 120, the camera i would build would likely be a mutant holga or a pinhole, (a mutant holga is a major modification of a toy camera built by a chinese company its extremely cheap peice of crap but once tamed can take amazing pictures im currently using the front half of one to build a 360 panorama camera) it wouldnt be that hard and you could recombine them rather easily the advantage over just using color film being that you get a stranger and sometimes more vivid effect (much color film might not neccissarily be panchromatic, ive seen studys that show them leaving out some spectrums our eyes can see) also you can substitute the filters for whatever you want and theoreticaly could combine them to get some realy bizzare color combinations far beyond what you get in reality. the same with the lumiere filter system. anyway if anyone has any comments or suggestions id love to hear them. wish me luck!
i realized that once i get a small lab, which im turning my shed into, it wont be that hard, the chemicals are fairly cheap, and unless you are being exotic not hard to get your hands on, though they are all fairly caustic, an interesting thing is that all the emulsions both dry and wet have chloride halide or bromide salts, and it has been said that you can even substitute potassium chloride in place of potassium bromide or halide, which is basic table salt, though im not sure if it being iodonized would make a difference. and in reality the hard part in all of this is getting a camera, and if i wasnt experianced with large format photography this would be impossible.
a little film history, as of right now all the same formats are still in use, 4x5 and 8 x 10 are big in large format photography, though 3 1/4 by 4 1/4 or whatever it is (in europe its 9x12 zeiss made a range of cameras that size i own one of them) that was phased out by the 1950s, which was the halfway between 4x5 and 2 1/4 by 3 1/4 which was still in use up until the 70s and now they use the cameras with 120 roll film backs. 120 is another format that has survived, all those kodak pocket cameras and most of the brownies took 120 film, which they tried to phase out with film formats like 616 and 620, both of which were basicly 120 film on different spools supposedly to make smaller cameras (the spools were thinner and metal). other rollfilms in use around that time include 35mm which wasnt used a whole lot, but was still in existance, mainly for movie film, which is almost its only use at the time, though the first leica which was 35mm was built around 1913. the other rollfilm format which was used in the first brownie and a lot of experimental press cameras and other cameras needing large format was a series of roll films around 5-6 in wide, some of this type was used to take the aerial shots from b-17 b-24 and b-29 bombers during the second world war but were used in the first by press photographers in graphlex and kodak cameras.
