Focalcamera, Collodion and upcoming portfolio
Heyhey, I'm back from my month off and have some exciting news for you.
First of all, I would like to share with you an interesting project I came across, which has been started by Mathijs van Oosterhoudt working in the surroundings of Rotterdam. He invented the DIY "Focal Camera" which is a simplistic, yet functional modular cameraconcept that may be built by anyone who is interested and motivated. The templates for the modules are openly available on www.focalcamera.com. It is certainly a brilliant idea, and a non-profit one, so it's definetly worth checking out.
Secondly, I have started working on a very oldish (yet perhaps one of the most interesting) photographic process: the wet-plate Collodion process. I've made my first tries with a very rudimentary 6x6 Rollfilm camera and very thin glass that just fitted in the tight camera body. It is a beautyful manner of creating something that is absolutely unique and far away from the pitch perfect results that most photographers try to achieve nowadays. I think it isn't even necessary to mention in this context that unbelievable feeling of holding for the first time ever a photo in your hands that has been immortalized on a piece of glass after you have treated it with several chemicals in a darkened room full of dizzying ether and ethanol fumes. Unfortunately, for the time being, I wouldn't be able to share much more than some blurry scans of my first (quite poor) results I've achieved with this technique, so I decided they aren't really worth showing on here. Anyhow I hope to find some time to bring this on, so that one day my wetplates will have a proper place here on this website. In the meantime, I will leave you with this fantastic video under here, created by Mark Zimmerman, on the wet-plate Collodion process.
Finally, I'd like to announce that a new portfolio is coming up soon, where I will use an old condenser from an enlarger in my pictures to create a shifted and flipped over view of different scenes in order to create a special image, playing with strange contrasts and warped perspectives. Here a little taste of what you can expect.
