Rock Band Wetplate – Shooting “The Black Proteus” with 7500 Watt of Strobepower

10/21/2018 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

The outcome of the shooting with the rock band “The Black Proteus” – www.theblackproteus.com was one of the coolest collodion wet plates I did this year. We had tons of fun during the whole process.

Because of the way I framed the band, I needed to stop down the lens of my 100 year old camera to about f6.5. Because of that I had to fire the Hensel Tria 6000 generator including the EH Pro 6000 Strobe head at full power. The Hensel INTEGRA 1000 PLUS compact strobe fired also at full power against the ceiling to bounce of as soft as possible. To avoid shadows on the background, I fired a 500 Watt strobe against it. With all that together I got the lightning done the way I wanted it.

When you watch the making of video, you listen also to their music and from my point of view, this song fits perfectly to this kind of photography.

To give you an idea about the resolution of a 18x23cm collodion wetplate, I attached a scan of the tattoo. Maybe you have read about disappearing tattoos on wetplates. With this plate, I figured how to make them visible again. I just underexpose the plate a bit and overdevelop it a bit. The cause of this: Wet Plate Collodion is mostly sensitive to blue light.

That means, that this color spectrum gets brighter on the plate. It seems that tattoos have blue and green tint in the black color and appear pretty bright on a tintype. With the technique mentioned above, I’m able to increase the contrast and so you are able to see them, this is like doing push
developing on analog film.

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If you guys want to experience yourself how a tintype is made and own a one of a kind wet plate, please contact me via my website wetplate.art