Archive for the 'preparation' Category
Tuesday, December 14th, 2021
Never give up – a 300mm Zeiss Tessar project with lots of fails
In todays video I documented my fails (wood working and 3d printing with sidewinder x1 – also building plate change of the sidewinder x1) while I tried to mount my new lens on my camera. I got this lens, because I do more and more wet plate family portraits and for that I wanted a sharp affordable lens. Normally I would show you guys how I did a family wet plate portrait(its online now, scroll down for the second part). But I couldn’t do it, because of our lockdowns. So I worked on a self portrait. To make this easier, I turned my studio into a darkroom, so I can move without getting a ghosty image on the plate. Because I put metal sheets into the ceiling during my studio renovation, I could mount the red light easily with magnets. To see the whole story, watch the video 🙂
First Part
Second Part
To find all the tools I used, check list.mhaustria.com
Wednesday, November 10th, 2021
Visiting Leica and Silvergrain Classics in Germany + Portra 400 c-41 developing included
In todays video I travel to Germany to prepare my Silvergrain Academy MasterClass wet plate workshop (click here for the workshop). I did also an Interview for the Silvergrain Classics, visited the Leica Headquarters and documented development of my Portra 400 film in the Silvergrain Classics lab.
Thursday, September 30th, 2021
Wet Plate Portraits at the Salzburger Freilichtmuseum
In todays video I show you some impressions of my on location wet plate shooting in Salzburg at the Salburher Freilichtmuseum. We had so much fun – it was great!
Thanks for the photos to: https://instagram.com/arturmughrabi https://instagram.com/bilder_schmiede https://instagram.com/drea.koch https://www.facebook.com/dachsteindesign
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021
a 170 year old process and high end food photography
everybody knows that I work exclusively on collodion wet plate portraits. So what’s the reason for food photography now? Let me try to explain. Many of you guys will remember that I bought a Cambo studio stand some while ago (https://blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/2021/02/my-new-150kg-studio-stand-that-is-from-1957-cambo-ast/ ). A little bit later I bought a used tray for it on Ebay. The seller was very friendly and somehow we started to talk about photography. Long story short, a month later we decided to do a project together. After months of planing, Hans Gerlach (a well known food photographer and columnist) drove over to my studio and brought his tools and some delicious food with him. Additional food for this shooting came from my garden, this way I could bring a bit more into the project besides my wet plate photography. During the planing period we discussed different dishes, their colours and how they would appear on a tintype (the wet collodion process only sees blue light and therefore red colours will turn black and blue white). We saw this come together as kind of a first test and wanted to see what what we could create. For me it was very interesting to have a chef working in my kitchen.
I suggested the 13x18cm format, because the camera is not too huge and can be easy mounted over head. We can get a bit more depth of field because of this smaller format. And I have a beautiful 250mm Zeiss Tessar lens that I can stop down to about F16 without having to long exposure times (two Hensel generators with 9000 w/s together helped to archive that and remember, its called wet plate, because the plate needs to be wet the whole time and can not dry). I mounted this beauty of a lens on my 13x18cm Mentor camera (check this article for my renovation of the beauty: https://blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/2021/08/shooting-wet-plate-portraits-with-an-affordable-large-format-bokeh-monster/ )
Even this studio Mentor camera and the tripod are meant for that kind of work, it felt funny to see my tools in that position.
While I prepared everything in my darkroom, Hans Gerlach did his magic in my kitchen. We were very excited to work on the first plate. And after we saw the result, we were even more excited, the outcome was gorgeous. So we worked very long on the first day (I think I went to bed at 4 am). But it was not all glory. We shot so many plates, that at some point my silver nitrate bath went bad. First I thought it was the collodion, the fixer and the developer, but after I changed all of that(I am always good prepared for important shootings and create everything twice or even three times) and still got funny looking plates, I know I need to change the silver nitrate bath.
After I changed the bath, everything was fine again and we could go on with the shooting.
We shot many different styles of the sourdough bread until we were happy with the outcome. This is one of our favourites plates. To hold it in our hands after months of planing and all the work we put together was wonderful. If you are interested in a print of this plate or any other, check out this link: prints.mhaustria.com
But this little setback should not be the only thing that kept me busy this day. After shooting many plates, my modified wet plate holder made my life a bit harder. Sometimes the plate won’t stay in place and the end result of that was a scratched plate….
I quickly solved the problem with a little redesign on the plate holder and from that on I was able to shoot without any problem. Before capturing every new dish, we were excited to see how it will turn out.
And most of them turned out great, I really like the beans and the spoon with chocolate mousse. The sheer amount of detail and texture of these scans from the wet plates are just incredible. They will look amazing on a big print.
To get as much done as possible, I scanned all 13x18cm (about 200mpix) and 18x24cm (about 300mpix, I decided later to do two bigger plates too) plates at night and also varnish them afterwards. So this night was quite short 🙂
I shot the bigger plates with a 150 year old Dallmeyer 2b Petzval lens to mix the this delicious bread with the beautiful swirly bokeh from this old lens. I really like how this plate turned out and how the out of focus areas look like.
After these intense shoots, we were always rewarded with great looking plates amazing tasting food.
Hans created also amazing tasting handmade pasta
To give you guys a much better idea of this shooting, I tried to captures as much footage as possible to bring you behind the scenes with this video
On thing is sure, we enjoyed our work together a lot and will do more like that in the future, but that needs again lots of planning. I am very happy that I met Hans and his work inspired me (yes there is also a inspired portrait coming up). I really look forward to our next shooting together (and yes, I also look forward to eat everything 🙂
Because I get asked very often about the tools I use for the wet plate process, I created a shopping list here: list.mhaustria.com
Thursday, July 15th, 2021
The First Analog Photography Festival After The Pandemic
This was such a great experience! It was not only great to meet people again at the Camera Obscura Festival, but it was also awesome to meet artists that are interested in an analog workflow. Another great thing is, that this festival is not an exclusive “wet plate event” it is also for people who work with the analog medium in any way. That was so cool, with this option you will experience things you may not have seen before. Like Large Format Cameras build from Legos. It was so nice to meet all of you guys finally in person another big thanks to Stefan, Christian and Denis for organising this great event! If you want to be notified for the next Camera Obscura Festival, register here: http://cof.mhaustria.com
Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com
Get cool analog shirts here shirts.mhaustria.com
For online wet plate workshops, visit this http://online.mhaustria.com
For private wetplate workshops contact me here: http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/kontakt/
Tuesday, July 6th, 2021
My infrared photograph at the La Gacilly
Very proud that one of my infrared images was curated to be shown at the huge exhibition (7km long) in Baden – the La Gacilly: https://festival-lagacilly-baden.photo If you are in Austria and close to Baden, you have to see this exhibition – it is really amazing!
Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com
get cool analog shirts here shirts.mhaustria.com
for online wet plate workshops, visit this http://online.mhaustria.com
For private wetplate workshops contact me here: http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/kontakt/
Tuesday, June 29th, 2021
Bringing a 50 year old Linhof tripod back to life – quick and dirty version
I have already one big tripod with a huge ball head from the large format manufactura Linhof. Linhof also produces their famous large format camera “Linhof Master Technika” which I own also one. So it was quite obvious that I couldn’t resist to repair this tripod I got. Somebody had a bicycle accident with it and therefore it was in a rough shape. But that did not stop me to give a repair a try. If you look how well these tripods are build, it would have been a shame to throw it away. This tripod was made in the 1970s and later. Thats another reason it fits good to my other cameras. Thanks a lot to Foto Koeberl from Graz who send me pictures and a video from a working ball head. Otherwise it would have been much more difficult to reverse engineer the function of it. Check out the video where you can see the whole process of the tripod repair.
Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com
get cool analog shirts here shirts.mhaustria.com
for online wet plate workshops, visit this http://online.mhaustria.com
For private wetplate workshops contact me here: http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/kontakt/
Wednesday, June 16th, 2021
I used Readyload film which expired 20 yrs ago for peaceful swan portraits
Shooting wildlife with a large format camera.
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Because I know this swan family for two seasons now, I am fully accepted and can come very close to them and their nest. They even trust me so much, that they sleep in front of me. It’s such a wonderful feeling for me to spend time with these guys.That’s also the reason I wanted to shoot large format portraits of them. My first idea was to shoot a collodion wet plate, because the swan mum was most of the time in her nest breeding her eggs. But because of the lockdown back then, I wasn’t allowed to stay outside that long. So I decided to shoot large format film with my Linhof Technika camera and a borrowed 400mm Tele Xenar lens on 4×5 Kodak Readyload film. I have my own fridge for them, because most of them are about 20 years expired and some of them are very unique for me, like the Kodak Ektachrome E100S or the Portrait 160VC. Because I like one of a kind photographs, I shot also Fujifilm FP-100C peel a part film (also expired) to get kind of a wet plate experience 🙂
I documented the whole story, inclusive a bad blooper and the outcome of the breeding in my latest YouTube documentary (I guess after 3,5 months its not just a vlog anymore). If you are interested in prints, check out http://prints.mhaustria.com – there is also one limited hand enlarged (Title “I am beautiful”) print series available.
all images are copyright protected
Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com
get cool analog shirts here shirts.mhaustria.com
for online wet plate workshops, visit this http://online.mhaustria.com
For private wetplate workshops contact me here: http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/kontakt/
Or book other ones here http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/workshops/
Don’t forget to subscribe to my Newsletter: http://blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/Newsletter/
Thursday, June 10th, 2021
Congrats to Albin Ouschan World Pool Champion and World Number One
The title says it all. Congrats Albin!
I did this portrait series 8 years ago and it is still one of my favourite portraits of him.
Wednesday, April 28th, 2021
Is the wet plate collodion process dangerous?
Not a question that is easy answered, but I try to do my best in my latest video. Depending what chemicals you use, there is much more you have to take care of. I will do sometimes a second video with more info. Before you start with this process inform yourself with a good book or a workshop from a person who knows about the danger of the chemicals.
get cool analog shirts here shirts.mhaustria.com
for online wet plate workshops, visit this http://online.mhaustria.com
For private wetplate workshops contact me here: http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/kontakt/
Or book other ones here http://www.markus-hofstaetter.at/pages/workshops/
Don’t forget to subscribe to my Newsletter: http://blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/Newsletter/