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Archive for the 'wetplate' Category

Monday, August 28th, 2023

Deep Space Lecture: Ars analogica – where Hightech meets pure Analog

Eine multimediale Zeitreise zum Ursprung der Fotografie.

Erlebt mit mir den historischen Nassplattenprozess in Form von mikroskopischen Aufnahmen, dreidimensionalen Porträts und 4K-Videos. Bei dieser Reise führe ich euch durch die Geschichte, stelle euch authentisches Equipment vor und präsentiere die daraus entstandenen extrem ausdrucksstarken und hochauflösenden Porträts auf einer 9×16 Meter großen Laserprojektion in 8K. So habt ihr Fotografie noch nie erlebt!

Hier gehts zu Anmeldung für den 13. Oktober:
https://ars.electronica.art/center/de/deep-space-lecture-ars-analogica/

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
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    Saturday, August 12th, 2023

    my portrait at one of the most beautiful places in Austria

    One of the most beautiful places in Austria – During poppy flower season there is a beautiful place to visit here in Austria. The Mohndorf (poppy seed village) in Armschlag. At exactly that place our „Menschenbilderausstellung“ (human pictures exhibition) was exhibited with one of my inspired series portrait. I love that place. Beautiful scenery, good food and a wonderful exhibition.

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
  • Posted by Markus | Filed in analog, collodium, exhibition, wetplate | Comment now »

     

    Thursday, August 3rd, 2023

    Should you buy a scratched lens?

    This topic brings often lots of emotion up. And honestly I was struggling myself buying lenses with scratches for some time. I still do. Thats why I wanted to take a closer look into this topic . Gary https://www.instagram.com/garygeezerphotoart/ sent me a scratched lens some time ago and therefore made this video possible. Thanks a lot for that!

    This old Ross projection lens got lots of fungi and scratches all over the glass

    But this is not the first scratched lens that I got, I bought a used canon 24mm lens a while ago from a shop for very little money. I knew already that the little scratches will not affect the image, but I still had a bad feeling. After Some years I can assure you, that all images that I shot with it looked great

    my scratched canon 24mm lens – no issue at all to work with it

    You still are not sure if you should get a scratched lens for a good price? Then have a look at my video, where I show how I shoot the plates with a scratched lens. I discuss this topic with a fellow wet plate artist who is also a specialist in renovation of historic photographic equipment: Denis of wetplatedreams.com Denis started recently a YouTube channel where he spreads his knowledge of historic lenses.

    As promised I posted the hires scans of the plates underneath. One plate is shot with the old Ross projection lens and one is shot with this very new Zeiss Epic projection lens.

    This projection lens is as clean as it gets

    Can you guess which plate was shot with the scratched lens? Click on the highres crops to see them in full resolution. You can use the chapters of the video to chump to the part where I explain what plate was shot with the scratched lens.


    Shooting wet plates with this projection lenses can be very tough, because the dof is very thin. I also think that one of the lenses had some chromatic aberration. That means, that the blue light is focusing on a different distance than the visible light. This is sometimes also called chemical blurring or chemical miss focus with the wet collodion process, because the wet collodion process sees only some parts of the UV light spectrum (about 420 to 490nm).
    I can only focus on the light I can see with my eyes, but some lenses focus because of the chromatic aberration the limages for wet plates on a different spot. Thats how a miss focus can happen. But you can see how extremely sharp both lenses performed anyway. To judge the sharpness for image A, have a look at the top and the right side of the cropped scan.

    Even I knew what was the plate that was shot with the scratched lens, and I still mixed them up and was convinced I was right when I showed it to my intern, shows how similar the plates are. This was another point that went to the scratched lens. Scratches and fungus mostly cover only a small percentage of the lens and thats the reason it won’t affect the image that much as you would think.

    If you want to support me and get deeper into topics like that, you always can book a workshop or join our Patreon team. Or just book a portrait session . Check also my Instagram channel for latest news: https://www.instagram.com/mhaustria/

    So what does that mean, should you buy scratched lenses? From our perspective, you definitely can buy scratched lenses. You will save money and still get the same results. It only affects the value. As always, it depends how big the damage of the lens is. More about that in my video. If you buy lenses as an investment, you probably will look for a mint lens, but here you have to put lots more money on the table.
    At the end, it all depends on your needs.

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
  • Posted by Markus | Filed in alumitype, analog, nassplatte, wetplate, workshop | Comment now »

     

    Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023

    Tin Questions Podcast Interview

    Excited and proud to share this with you. Chad from Tin Questions interviewed me about my life and my portrait work. I had such a great time and I think it turned out wonderful. Read the intro in Chad’s words:

    I recently went camping and got ate up by mosquitos. My next guest on “Tin Questions”, Austrian wetplate photographer Markus Hofstätter, lives in a town known for these pesky insects. Not only is Markus a well known European photographer, he is also a great resource to the wetplate community, sharing his knowledge, doing equipment reviews and similar to “Tin Questions”, conducting the occasional interview. Hear how a love of shooting pool with both sticks and cameras eventually turned into a desire to slow down and create beautiful images using a historic process.
    Listen to “Tin Questions” on your favorite podcast provider.
    https://open.spotify.com/show/4GtyKMPDLzL9wGIdjXu5do
    https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/tin-questions/id1662388680?i=1000623166166

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
  • Posted by Markus | Filed in podcast, wetplate | Comment now »

     

    Friday, July 21st, 2023

    My Podcast Interview with Silvergrain Classics magazine about my Wet Plate Work and AI

    iTunes | Spotify | Deezer | Castbox.fm | TuneIn | Stitcher | RSS Feed

    Ep. 13: Hofstätter’s Intensely Personal Portraits vs. AI

    by Erik Schlicksbier, Marwan El-Mozayen

    Wet plate collodion portrait photographer Markus Hofstätter is our guest in this episode. He creates particularly individual, intimate portraits by collaborating closely with the persons he portrays. This human aspect is especially important to him despite all the virtuosity necessary to create wet plate collodion images. We were also interested in Markus’ view of current developments in the field of AI. Join us in this podcast for an exciting conversation about the present and future of photography.

    Markus online:

    mhaustria.com

    patreon.mhaustria.com

    youtube.com/mhaustria

    instagram.com/mhaustria

    flipboard.com/@mhaustria

    facebook.com/mhaustria

    mastodon.art/@mhaustria@flipboard.social

    Your hosts:

    Marwan El-Mozayen from Silvergrain Classics magazine (https://silvergrainclassics.com/en)

    Erik Schlicksbier, photographer (https://www.schlicksbier.com) and host of the German language Studio Kreativkommune podcast (https://studio.kreativkommune.org/podcast).

    Posted by Markus | Filed in ai, collodion, podcast, portraits, wetplate | Comment now »

     

    Wednesday, July 12th, 2023

    It’s time to say goodbye – a story about an end and a new start

    In todays post I’ll use photography to make memories for my cherry tree that I grew up with since I was a little boy.

    Many years ago I renovated the house of my grandma and with that came also a big garden full of trees. Every year I am lucky to harvest fresh raspberries, apples, pears, cherries and many other fruits. It’s so wonderful to wake up in the morning and get yourself some fresh breakfast from the garden.

    This was the garden when I inherited it, you can see parts of the huge cherry tree in the background

    The biggest and probably oldest tree of all is my cherry tree. I remember climbing it when I was little. It brings a wonderful big shade during the hot days and it’s fruits are so delicious.

    you can see how big my cherry tree was many years ago
    The recent years thunder storms and heavy rain hit really hard on the tree. Its missing about half of its branches on one side.

    I always thought this giant beauty will outlive me for sure. But after the last visit from a gardner I learned that the tree is probably completely hollow already and it it will be soon not save anymore to walk under it. That really made me sad, because I have so many memories with this tree. That was the moment, when I realised, that I want to capture a last memory on an ultra large format ambrotype. I captured already a tintype of some cherry blossoms of this tree many years ago. and I am really glad that I did.

    For this project I brought my 12×16″ wooden Ultra Large Format came into my garden. Lenswise I decided to go with my 360mm Voigtländer Heliar universal.

    I did a similar plate with the same setup last year, when I captured the rebirth of one of my apple trees.
    The tree looked like It was dying, but it grew out of it self again. When I thought it was dying, I gave it another year. And exactly in this year it grew new branches. And yesterday I had the first of its apples again for breakfast.

    I exposed the apple tree ambrotype for the trunk of the tree to get a bright look. With that I get lots of solarization where the branches touch the sky and I think this looks great on glass plates.

    But for the cherry tree I wanted to do things a bit differently. Thats why I used a very old collodion, old developer and a stronger fixer. With overexposing again, this should give me a warmer look with again lots of solarization.

    The wet plate process is mostly seeing blue light and thats why the sky is easily overexposed. I really love how this turned out.

    Maybe you ask yourself why I exposed for the tree trunk on both of these images. If I would have exposed for the green leaves or thin branches, the ambrotypes would have been much more contrasty you may think. My thoughts are, that the trunk is one of the most important parts of the tree. If it gets hollow, there is a great chance, that the tree will die.

    As always I did a scan of the plate, to have kind of a copy of it. If you want to know more about this huge scanner, have a look here: https://youtu.be/Oi3Tef3zZPE
    I always try to get the scan as close to the real thing, but to see the light reflecting on the silver when it hits the glass plate is not is something you can not replicate in a scan.
    This will be a memory that lasts forever . To see these two plates side by side, please check the end of my video, a photo or scan just won’t do justice. For me the apple tree plate stands for a new beginning and the Cherry tree p late for the end.
    I am really sad that the tree must go. But where life ends there will be a new one. After it is gone, I will plant a new cherry tree there. And for sure I will do some plates of it. portrait (c) Michael Liebert

    I chose these portrait of me here, because it fits in perfectly into this story. Some time ago I booked a portrait session with Michael Liebert. He knew that I am connected to my garden and to this tree, thats why he choose to take my portrait there. And now this portrait is the prefect fit for my story today.

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
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    Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

    Exhibitions 2023

    I am grateful and proud to have my art exhibited again in Freiluftgalerie Freiraum-Foto Persenbeug and Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo. In Persenbeug you can see my wet plate portraits from my Inspired Series and other favourites from this year. In Baden one of my drone images of Castle Schönbühel in Wachau is shown. It’s always nice to see your own work exhibited. Thanks to everyone who made this possible. Also thanks to my Patreon supporters! This video of my exhibitions is very different Thant my previous one. I wanted to integrate my creation process into it. What do you think?

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
  • Posted by Markus | Filed in alumitype, analog, collodion, exhibition, wetplate | Comment now »

     

    Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

    Upcoming wet plate talk in Graz, progress and the moon on a space zoom smartphone

    In today’s video there is a little preview of my current project, info about my wet plate lecture in Graz and how smartphones change images.

    For “non-photographers” some features are really great and very helpful. But then I ask myself why are these features not called by it’s name. Other functions, like changing or even modifying facial features, are almost creepy. What do you think?

    In the gallery underneath are a few examples of my moon photos and the equipment. Of course you can take pictures of the moon with small cameras/lenses nowadays, but I was a bit skeptical about the pictures from smartphones back in 2021.

    Here the link to my lecture about wet plate photography in Graz. https://www.fomograz.at/veranstaltungen-2023/

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
  • Posted by Markus | Filed in 3d print, ai, photography, photos, preparation, wetplate | Comment now »

     

    Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

    Traveling with an Ultra Large Format Camera for a Wedding Wet Plate

    With todays video I want to give you a glimpse how it is to travel with an ultra large format camera. This time I didn’t bring my darkroom tent, because I could use the shop on the farm. Traveling with my big camera is always a hassle and can bring some troubles with it. But this time it worked out great.

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
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    Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

    Testing 6 Types of Wet Plate Varnish

    I did a live stream about different types of varnish for my Patreon supporters (If you join tier 2, you can rewatch the recording of the live stream). Because some of you complained after my posting about Lukas varnish that this one is not available in your country, I bought more different ones and did this video. Enjoy guys: I show tested lots of interesting alternatives. My favourite right now is the Cobra odourless varnish gloss 102. You can get it here: international https://amzn.to/3YAVx8k Germany https://amzn.to/429li2D

  • Get yourself a beautiful print here: http://prints.mhaustria.com

  • Find all the tools I use here : http://list.mhaustria.com

  • Looking for wet plate gear? http://gear.mhaustria.com

  • Buy me a tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mhaustria

  • Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mhaustria

  • Get cool analog shirts here http://shirts.mhaustria.com
  • Posted by Markus | Filed in ambrotype, collodion, diy, nassplatte, varnish, wetplate | Comment now »