Earlier today the RPS Historical Group had an hour long presentation on YouTube on the topic of Contemporary Wet Plate Collodion Photography. For those unfamiliar with this technique, this was invented by the English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer (1813 – 1 May 1857) as a way to market his work to a wider audience. Unfortunately he could not afford to patent the process & died in poverty aged 43 or 44 in 1857 leaving his invention open for use without paying royalties. It transformed photography by enabling shorter exposures to be made (seconds rather than hours) and was used by the famous Victorian photographer of the Crimean War,
Roger Fenton (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869).
The presentation, recorded on 2.4.24, is made by Tony Richards who makes images on glass plates using the wet plate collodion technique. You can watch how a plate was made by a photographer by watching the BBC documentary series Britain in Focus: A Photographic History presented by EamonnMcCabe, Series 1, Episode 1, available on the BBC iPlayer at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08h95jk/britain-in-focus-a-photographic-history-series-1-episode-1You can watch the presentation at the link below. If you have a subscription to YouTube you can see it without any irritating adverts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaptZvg8oJY
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