Great North Festival at Beamish…
The Museum took part in a wider Festival of the North East this weekend, contributing numerous activities as well as a mini steam gala. The photos below show some of what was happening, including an airing for No.18 (Lewin) – this has now had the bureaucratic matter associated with it sorted out and the cold exam of the boiler was successfully carried out last week. We can now proceed to a steam test and certification of the loco and testing of it in earnest – a long time in coming!
Below: Andy Martin uses a wet plate photographic process to capture various transport scenes around the Colliery, in glorious sunshine. For the result of this exposure, scroll down to the black & white section later in this post…
Here are the results of Andy Martin’s experimentation with ‘tin type’ photography. A number of the views above were set up for him to apply wet plate principles (a mid 1800s technique) whereby a piece of aluminium is coated in chemicals and immediately placed into the camera and an exposure made. The plate is then rushed to a makeshift darkroom and is processed, resulting in a small plate with an image captured on its surface. Andy might be pursuaded to write more on the subject at some point, but meanwhile here are the fruits of his labours – noting that the images are reversed… These are therefore the real thing, with no digital interference whatsoever.
It appears from the photo of Andy that he was using an out of period tripod otherwise a very good set of photos
What fascinating photographs, the results are very good. I take it that there was know way of taking prints from the metal plates?
Hi Eric, thank you. There’s a few options when shooting wetplate: directly onto a (black/dark) piece of metal which results in a positive image; or onto glass which enables prints to be taken from the negative image. The latter would likely have been an Albumen (egg white, salt and silver nitrate coated paper essentially) contact print. I should also add that a positive image (ambrotype) can also be achieved from a coated glass plate if solid black backing is placed or painted behind it. Hope this helps!