Preparing the Collodio-Albumen Plates

I’ve started preparing the Collodio-Albumen plates.

There are a couple of things that you need to get right before you proceed. The biggest one is preparing your iodized albumen. I only made 150 ml because I want to make sure the recipe is in order before I commit. Same with the plate size. I’m testing with Half Plate - 4.25” x 5.5” (10,8 x 14cm). All of it is in service to testing the process and seeing what it can and can’t do, or what I can or can’t do.

A few things that I noticed right away:

  1. The Iodized Albumen didn’t get very many bubbles, in fact, almost no bubbles at all. There was NO problem pouring from my bottle to the plate and back and forth. I covered each plate at least three or four times with the Iodized Albumen.

  2. The Aceto-Nitrate bath (6.7%) sensitizing bath is loaded with Glacial Acetic Acid (6%). It did turn kind of “foggy” after adding the glacial acetic acid. I’m not overly concerned with it, just a note. Question: Does silver nitrate react with glacial acetic acid? Answer: Silver acetate can be synthesized by the reaction of acetic acid and silver carbonate. Solid silver acetate precipitates upon the concentration of solutions of silver nitrate and sodium acetate. UPDATE: This morning, all is good. I sunned and filtered the bath and it’s clear and clean.

  3. I did run some tests by exposing two of the four plates to “light” (bulb) after the distilled water wash. I albumenized them with a 60W bulb. The other two, I albumenized under the safelight.

I will sensitize the plates today and make some exposures tomorrow. Again, I will start at 3 minutes at f/16 and increase one minute for each plate. 3, 4, 5, 6 - a total of four plates and covering the spread in Mudd’s book with a similar lens (290mm) and f/stop (16).

It’s simple enough to do. I only made 150 ml of Iodized Albumen - enough to get testing going.

I tend to over-beat the whites, but it makes cleaner albumen in my opinion. This contains; KI, KBr, and DH2O.

Mark your containers clearly. Only use the bottle for what you label it as - cross contamination is something you can avoid with planning and preparation.

Four Half Plates: Collodio-Albumen Negatives!