Creating glass plate negatives

8 March 2018 Holly Schulte, Curator Digital Assets

Photograph in the style of the Specials, in negative. Photo Holly Schulte © Sydney Living Museums

Photography practitioners today are rediscovering historical, analogue photography processes. This includes the creation of silver gelatin glass plate negatives, known as the dry plate process.

While dry plates are no longer available for sale, they can be handmade, exposed and processed similarly to photographers of the past.

Recently I had the opportunity to hand-make silver gelatin dry plate negatives with Ellie Young, an Australian expert in alternative photographic processes. Ellie shares her expertise at Gold Street Studios in Trentham, Victoria, where she operates darkrooms, workshops and an exhibition space dedicated to specialist photographic processes. I spent a day learning how to create, expose and process dry plate negatives.

We started with a piece of glass, which we prepared, coated, exposed and processed resulting in negatives ready for printing. The experience demonstrated both the camera craft required to obtain a well-focused, correctly exposed negative as well as the practical and technical knowledge needed for darkroom processing and mixing chemicals.

This image gallery illustrates the main steps in turning a piece of glass into an exposed and processed dry plate negative.

Captured on glass

Read all the posts in this Captured on glass series:

  • Channelling the police photographer
  • Photography with slow emulsions
  • Creating glass plate negatives

Find out more about our upcoming 1920s Mugshots Photography Workshop with Holly and photographer Enrico Scotece:

Past Event

Underworld: ‘Specials’ mugshot photography

Sunday 6 May 2018 10AM–2PM Justice & Police Museum

Unleash your inner criminal or channel a feisty flapper during an exclusive 1920s-style photo shoot with photographer Enrico Scotece.

See more Events > Crime, Workshops

About the author

Holly Schulte

Curator Digital Assets

Holly is the Curator Digital Assets with Sydney Living Museums where she is part of the Collections & Access team.

Published on