Archive for the 'preparation' Category
Wednesday, September 14th, 2022
A free wet plate/tintype?
Sounds crazy but it is possible, if you support me on Patreon (from the second tier), you will get early access to add free videos, live streams (shooting and discussing wet plates), support and troubleshooting and after a year a free one of a kind wet plate sent to you. Check my Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria
Wednesday, September 7th, 2022
Freilichtmuseum Salzburg Wet Plate Experience (rainy days)
Wet plate in the rain? Sure thats why its called wet plate 🙂 We had a great time in Salzburg and it was a pleasure to be there again. It’s great to do portraiture in these wonderful old houses. You have to visit this museum when you are nearby. It is totally worth it. The best time would be when I shoot portraits there 😉
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022
Exhibition invitation and more
Exciting news, a wonderful exhibition is coming up where a lot of my wet plates are shown in a big format. The Exhibition is called “Kopf, Herz, Hand” that translates to “Head, Heart, Hand” and shows artist that put passion and craftsmanship into their work. The Vernissage is on the 17th of June at 5pm at the Rathausplatz in 3680 Persenbeug. It also includes a guided tour through all artworks. I would be super happy if I meet you guys there.
Beside that I also talk about what are the benefits to support me as a patron http://patron.mhaustria.com , what I am working on for my upcoming videos and why you should follow me on Flipboard http://flip.mhaustria.com
Wednesday, May 18th, 2022
Inspired Series – Henrik Brahe and Gerhad Sokol
My inspired series is going on slowly, but for sure I captured wonderful people on metal plates. First you see Henrik Brahe. An archaeologist and photographer from Portugal. He brought me a wonderful book of his work. Find out more about him at http://henrikbrahe.com He visited with his beautiful wife Sanne. I could not resist to capture them together as well.
Gerhard Sokol is a well know photographer who captured history with his work. But after all these years in photography, he did not stop there, he went on to work with lots of different techniques. He also published a book recently that tis worth to buy. you can find his work and book on https://www.bilderges.at
More information about the Book (with beautiful prints and stories) and the Inspired Series: http://inspired.mhaustria.com
Thursday, May 12th, 2022
Growing Together – World Wet Plate Day 2022
I decided to participate this year for the world wet plate day. I discussed it with my girlfriend and she was the one who came up with the idea. First we thought to make it in one shot, but I couldn’t wrap the outcome into my mind because of the limited depth of field. So I came up with the double exposure solution. I was pretty happy with the outcome, but thought I could improve it a bit -> that was not my best idea (happy I did a scan before that). As you can see in the video, I got also unlucky with the varnish. So I am working right now on that to fix it. I will write about my result here on ma Patron page, you can support me and join here: Become a Patron!
Wednesday, April 27th, 2022
Bringing a 73KG High End Scanner Back to Life
Sometimes I ask myself, how do I get myself always into these enormous projects. Maybe this is how everything is supposed to be in my life. Or somebody putting these big pieces of work in front of my and tries to find out if I will ever give up. But thats where I a have to disappoint, I hardly give up on something.
I was looking for a bigger Scanner for many years, because I wanted to be able to scan my ultra large format wet plates. In the video bellow you can watch my full story. Underneath the video I will go into some details. Find out at the bottom of that post how you can support me and my work to make this postings/videos possible.
Here are some details about the Screen Cezanne Scanner:
- 53x34cm (13.4″ x 20.9″) reflective & transparency scan surface
- 5300dpi
- 32-bit CMYK, 48-bit RGB, 8-bit grayscale
- Interface SCSI II
- supported formats TIFF; DPS; DCS; SCITEX CT; JPEG; YCC
- 73kg heavy
- Software: Color Genius 2.1 and 1
Picking it up and bringing it home was a bit of a challenge. But somehow we managed to get it into my studio. Please be sure if you get yourself such a beast, that you put it into lock position before you transport it. Then you can also unmount its wing. Check the Maintenance guide here
Get as much information as possible from the large format forum thread https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?33565-Screen-Cezanne-Users-Unite
Yes, I could have just used the Power Mac (433mhz) that came with the Scanner and it would have been all over. But, then I had to use the use Firewire hdd, or USB 1 connections. Did anybody of you guys ever tried to copy large image files via usb 1.1? So USB 1.1 transfers with about 12 mbit, thats little under one megabyte a second. Believe me, you don’t won’t to copy many gigabytes over that connection. Other than that, the original Mac was pretty slow wit MacOs 9. All tools I describe here are listed here list.mhaustria.com
Thats the reason I got a used Power Mac G4 Quicksilver with dual 1.2 ghz and 2gig (I said wrongly 4gb in the video) of ram. You can see in the video how cool it is and that it came with an Apple Cinema Display in its original packaging.
While I set everything up, I got a scary surprise over night, luckily nothing was damaged. More about that in the video.
Even it was much faster, I needed to upgrade it with an USB 2 card (be sure to get one with a specific new chipset – (links to it at and everything else here list.mhaustria.com), an ssd, a Power Domain 2930 SCSI card (I got a sealed one, check it out in the video) and an PATA/SATA Adapter. This made the Mac really quick.
Long story short, cloning (with carbon copy cloner) everything on the ssd, did not bring any success. Because the old MacOS 9 would not run on the new Mac and the preinstalled Mac OS X would not support the SCSi controller.
Thats why I installed http://macos9lives.com and MacOS X 10.3.2 Panther from the apple website. MacOS creates easily a multi boot when you install one OS after the previous one. To connect remotely with screen sharing form Mac OS X to Mac OS X you just have to enable the feature. For Mac OS9 install this one: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/155-vine-vnc-server-3-5-for-os9
As you can se ein the video, coping files over 1gb ethernet connection is great. I can get about 60 Megabyte a second out of it. that is more than 60 times faster than usb 1.1
Now everything was setup and ready, I worked on a ultra large format wet plate. That was a great opportunity to see what the scanner can do. This is a 30x40cm collodion wet plate. Shot on an ultra large format camera with a Voigtländer Heliar Universal 360mm F 4.5 Lens
Now it is time for the first scans. The results are amazing. Just a little hint for reflective scans. Always try to use a black background, otherwise you get light bleeding into your image. The files this scanner produces are beautiful. There eis not much need of any post processing. That saves so much time. I love it.
For wet plate workshops (Nassplattenworkshops) check ws.mhaustria.com. For portraits wetplate.art or (German/Deutsch) wetplate.at and if you want to see more street portraits check street-portraits.eu
Also the negatives and positives look great. Check out the Gallery for more impressions
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022
Wet Plate Portrait Workshop at the Silvergrain Classics Academy
My todays vlog is about the wet plate workshop in Germany. This time I take you with me behind the scenes. For upcoming wet plate / Nassplatten workshops (German and English) visit http://ws.mhaustria.com
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
