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?
Wednesday, May 10th, 2023
Shooting a HDR tintype with a super fast lens (and get them on Ebay)
When shooting wet plates, you deal with a very light insensitive process (about iso 0.5). So most wet plate artists wants to get their hand on a fast lens. Wolfgang, a former participant of my wet plate workshop got his hand on a very fast lens and sent it over to me. For the first time, you can get the plates from this project on eBay, starting from 1 Euro – http://ebay.mhaustria.com
This Delta HD-6C ML lens is pretty huge and was used in vintage HD protectors many years ago. If you want to know more about this kind of lenses, check this blog post: blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/2023/03/shooting-an-ultra-fast-lens-140mm-f1-with-an-ultra-large-format-camera/
See the full transformation in my video
The yellow part of the flower absorbs a lot of UV light and thats the reason it appears dark when I exposed the plate normally. Thats why I did this series of 4 different exposures. I think every single one of them has something special in it. Just for fun, I created a digital HDR image out of them
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.
Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
Shooting an ultra fast lens (140mm F1.0) with an ultra large format camera
In short words “this lens is something else”. It’s extremely fast, huge and has a strange focus distance. It was used in Sony CRT Projectors from 1997. I bought it some years ago from a very interesting guy. He had so many more great stuff in his shop and I regret that I did not buy more. It took me some time to find the right opportunity to use that lens. But I think it was worth the waiting. I am glad my friend and former workshop participant Alois Stingl came over with is wonderful ultra large format camera.
Before I could use it, it needed some cleaning, I used a cloth that was soaked with water and just put it on the lens without wiping to avoid more scratches.
I measured the lens at infinity to calculate the F-Stop. I measured 135mm and the front element was 145mm That is about a F0.9 lens. But a document I found on the internet told me its more an F 1.0 lens. Still crazy fast.
When I saw the yellow coating on the front element of the lens, I thought about Mathieu Stern’s video about radioactive lenses. If it really is made of Thorium, it is indeed radioactive, but only for a very small amount. Watch Mathieu’s video to learn more about this Material
Because the lens is very fast it is still dangerous. If it focuses the sun on something, it will start to burn immediately. That’s the reason you should not put the lens near a window and always put a lens cap on it.
I thought it would be interesting to calculate the crop factor of an 40x50cm ultra large format camera. If you use the common formula to calculate crop factors you will see that this plate size has a crop factor of 0.0067 compared to a full frame sensor. With that you also can calculate the comparable depth of field F-Stop. This would also be F 0.067 compared to F 1.0 on a full frame camera. When I tried to focus on the ground glass, I could barley find something in focus. Thats why you see me focusing for a very long time.
But there is more. a 140mm lens is a tele lens on a full frame camera, but it’s a wide angle lens on an ultra large format camera. This is because of the bigger plate size of the ULF camera. listen to my full explanation in the video.
To “connect” the lens to the camera, I designed and printed a basic flange in Tinkercad. It needed some pool line and tape, but eventually it worked out.
The next issue was the fact that my darkroom was not made for 40x50cm plates. only for 30x40cm ones. After some tests with smaller plates, we only had one cup of developer left. Beside that, everything starts to get unpleasantly expensive if you pour on plates with this size. So my goal was to make it work with only one attempt. I did some dry runs to get comfortable with everything. Not only the dark room work was something I had to prepare for, but also the camera. These old beauties all have some quirks. Besides that, Alois made a beautiful plate holder by himself. These holder needed also some special attention. But as explained in the video, I love these challenges. It makes the result at the end even more sweet.
To calculate the strobe power I needed, I used my wet plate strobe calculator that I created for my Patreon supporters. Since I made it, I use it all the time for myself, because it makes life much easier with the wet plate process. If you are a fan of analog photography and the wet plate process, have a look at our wet plate conversation magazine on Flipboard. Besides many great stories about our favourite process, you’ll wind there also work from other wet plate artists.
But this is not the end, because of some kind of funny coincidence, a former workshop participant sent me a very similar lens over. I am thinking to do a still life plate with that one. What do you guys think?
But there is more, I got also a very tiny lens. I guess I need to build a camera for this one
I hope you enjoyed that journey. It took me a long time to finish everything, but I am again glad that I worked through it.
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
Handmade Portraiture – Rita Newman, a Tintype Story
More than 8 years ago I decided to go down this path.
Creating all the chemicals I need by myself, refurbishing cameras and lenses by myself, and sometimes creating new parts/recipes myself. This path can be very rewarding and enriching, but there are also dark moments that take a lot of energy. In these 8 years I have experienced and learned a lot.
But while working with this process I will never stop learning, it is a constant problem solving and listening to your gut feelings. I think that is also one of the reasons why I love doing portraits with it. Taking a lot of time for a single portrait is another reason.
People who have been portrayed by me will certainly be able to name many other reasons why this kind of art is so inspiring.
In today’s video you will get a better impression of what I have written.
It was a pleasure to immortalize you on pure silver dear Rita
Monday, January 9th, 2023
How to load Analog FIlm into a Sony A7 – An Analog Portrait Photographers view of the upcoming year 2023 and why AI is not the End
My own prediction about what will photography be in the future and what I will do about it
I am not doing a rewind or recap this year. I think there are too many of these out there and I have mostly the feeling it’s only a fill-in. You can watch my “end of 2022 studio tour” video or my recent scanner renovation video if you want to watch something instead of reading this article.
The pink elephant in the room
It’s there, and everybody is seeing it (Also non photographers). Some people are scared, some are angry and others ignore it. What I am talking about? AI, like Midjourney, Dall-E or the text focused chatGPT. This will not change our world, it changed it already. The ai integration in our lives started a little sneaky, with some cool filters for example, google recaptcha, or enhancements for our phone cameras. Text-wise, we had chat bots that were mostly bad and voice assistants that were somewhere inbetween. Close your eyes and paint your own picture about how you felt about ai at the beginning of 2022. And now face reality and think how much it has improved in the last 5 Months and how much it improves now on a daily bases. For me it’s crazy how great these generated images/portraits look like and how they get better by the hour. It gets harder and harder for me to identify these generated images. I think these “calculated” pictures can be very useful sometimes and many of them look great.
I wrote a German article for c’t Fotografie (online pay or paper magazine) about this topic, you can read it here: https://www.heise.de/select/ct-foto/2023/1/2219314550220514230 This includes also an interview with an portrait artist that uses ai: Klaudia Ratzinger
But I also think that all these generated images should have a digital watermark, so social media and websites can tag them as generated. People need to know if that image they are looking at is real or generated. I know that there is Photoshop as well, but these ai tools can be operated form a 5 year old and the results will fool you. Ai affects already so many business, not only photography, but also writers, lawyers, translators, book authors and many many more. I recently saw an article that a guy used chatGPT to create a children’s book. He also asked chatGPT to write down descriptions for pictures, so other ai picture generators can create imagery for the book from this description. He is selling the finished product now on Amazon. I also read a reddit thread where there was the need for a letter from a lawyer. Somebody asked chatGPT to write a letter and the user asking for a lawyer letter had success with it. You don’t have any programming skills? just ask chatGPT to write a script/program for you.
“Words can be powerful” gets a totally new meaning these days.
Talking with chatGPT can also be hilarious – more at the end of this posting
Does that mean we need to be scared as a photographer? I don’t think so. Let me explain:
- At the beginning of photography, painters were upset because photographers had no idea about posing and light. Of course it was much easier to get a portrait from one day to another. That changed crime scene documentation totally.
- Later black and white film photographers were upset about color film photography.
- At the beginning of 2000, film photographers were upset about digital photography
- And later digital photographers were upset about phone cameras
- And now the same discussion starts with ai generated images. Even we use ai already for many years in our phones (or how do you think it was possible to capture a detailed moon photo with your phone?)
And today all these mentioned techniques are still coexisting. That’s why I think they will also coexist in the future. I think good photographers must be “stage managers” these days. They need to sell an experience. Something the customer will remember for a very long time. For example, when somebody gets their wet plate portrait taken in my studio, they for sure will remember that forever.
This kind of photography is so different in our fast moving world. Sure, people could use a tintype filter. But that is like seeing a great dinner on a photograph instead of going there and enjoying it. Or think of a wet plate workshop, or any other kind of photography workshop. Creating something by yourself is always exciting and fun.
This works also for digital. I just had a business shooting for two days and this can be a great experience as well. People were excited and happy.
I think that may be a different story for non portrait photographers, like food, architecture or product photographers. But a lot of companies are working already with generated (3D renderings) images for their catalogs. And as far as I know, these generated images are directed by photographers.
Please comment how you think other photography business will be affected by ai.
Relax
That is something I am not very good of. I have so much in my mind and want to do everything at once. But I try to go for walks every day to relax. Instead of my camera, I bring my new binoculars with me. I got myself some cool ones for Christmas (US click here – German click here for the ones I bought). So why I am telling you this? Because I felt the need sometimes to bring my camera to my walks, to capture deers, swans and other wildlife scenes. The binoculars are a great substitute for that. They will calm you down, because you can not use them to take pictures. I use them to watch wildlife and enjoy it a lot.
My new year resolutions for 2023
Don’t seek for perfect wet plate portraits all the time, accept the one you did and appreciate it. Look for more assignments that you enjoy and less that you don’t. Work more on your own projects you love.
How to load analog film into a Sony A7 digital camera?
Let’s end this post with something fun. I asked chatGPT some questions about wet plate and analog photography. And at the end, chatGPT ended up explaining me how to load film into a Sony A7 camera and why medium format film would not fit in. And no worries, the sensor cleaning and the ibis of the Sony A7 will not destroy your film either. And if you ever looked for a film rewind button on your digital camera, chat GPT got you covered. In that case chatGPT acts like a little child that made a mistake and makes up more facts to cover it. Please be aware that all other answers about the wet plate process and so on contains also false information (I won’t explain everything, but for insiders it’s fun to read). As always, if you are interested in that process, take a workshop or read a book (chatGPT tells you the same). Enjoy the answers guys (You need to open some screenshots in a new browser tab to be able to read them):
How does a digital camera that loads analog film look like?
I asked that question Midjourney and got these results 🙂
Wednesday, December 28th, 2022
Denis Krieg – Inspired Series
I’ve known Denis for a few years now and over time a nice friendship has developed. We met for the first time during the Camera Obscura Festival in Germany, but we were in contact several times before that.
From Denis I bought my current large format camera and some lenses. Also one of my more important lenses – the Dallmeyer 3b which I use a lot for this series is from Denis. Read more in this post https://blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/2021/03/inspired/
His knowledge of historical equipment is fascinating. His craftsmanship and restoration skills are also second to none. Check out his website here www.wetplatedreams.com.
Denis keeps historic history alive with his work.
I also captured a portrait with Denis and his Wife Sybille that I like a lot.
Wednesday, December 14th, 2022
Bringing a Cheap 24 Year Old High-End Scanner Back to Life – It’s mind blowing
It all started when we needed to scan some slides. With my Screen Cezanne 5000 scanner I would get an amazing quality, but it would be exhausting to do. I have an old Epson scanner that could do it, but it’s also not a very comfortable task. So I had an eye on a Agfa Duoscan Hid scanner. These scanners scan film without the need of a glass. That makes things much easier. They are also great flatbed scanners. With that I take more care about my valuable Screen scanner. The lamps of it are not longer available, when they break its over. But as always it was more difficult to get this scanner up an running than I thought. It needed lots of cleaning and my first idea about a fitting computer was also not my best one.
Wednesday, November 30th, 2022
David Kriesel – Inspired Series
David Kriesel is a data scientist from Bonn – Germany. He was born in 1984 and is self-employed from 1998 on (at the time he was 14). Find more details here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kriesel
You might know him in connection with the Xerox bug he discovered in 2013. (German version here)
David also does a lot of talks. The combination of data science and talks may sound boring to some of you. But this is only because you never watched one of David’s extremely entertaining and very interesting talks. He will explain a specific topic to you, that you probably never thought will be of any interest for you. After he finished his talk, he for sure has convinced you otherwise.
There is a quote that I like to mention from one of his talks, that made me think and smile: “Mathematics know no mercy” and that reflects for me what his talks are about. There are no shortcuts, behind every of his projects is a lot of hard work. But with that comes a lot of fun stories.
I am very grateful that David took the time to fly over from Germany with his Dad to be my sitter in front of my wet plate camera for the inspired series. I also enjoyed talking to his dad a lot, he is a wonderful person and I can see now where David got his humour from. It was great meeting both of you and so much fun. Thanks again for your time!
We chose this pose to express a sceptical moment of his projects
This is an interesting one. I underexposed the portrait on purpose to overdevelop it.
Normally this brings out more grain, but in that case it brought out some interesting silver waves.
Collodion has sometimes its own ways to express things,
maybe this is the process showing all the things that go through the mind of David.
I like this one a lot. I think it reflects perfectly the great energy these guys have.
Friday, November 18th, 2022
Wet Plate Strobe Calculator with Light Modifier Comparison
How much power do I need for my wet plate setup? I get this and similar questions asked a lot. Thats the reason I build a calculator for that. With the calculator, there comes also a knowledge base. Because there is much more to know about strobes and the wet collodion process. This is exclusive for Patreon supporters (Tier 2). With tier 2 support you get, also wet plate troubleshooting, access to recorded Patreon videos, early access to videos and much more. Link to this Patreon posting: https://www.patreon.com/posts/wet-plate-strobe-74548519
More about the calculator in this video: