The surface is not that much rough, hardly noticeable, but for the action of the pencil is enough.In the past, photographers retouched much smaller formats or much finer details than those I retouched. The other two are a bit more complex and are hybrid modifications from a number of literature sources.
Here is where history meets art history. The print was made by contact on a very rustic and warm tone paper called Fomatone MG Classic.Simply put everything in a small beaker and stir it to dissolve. Drying is fast and the negative is ready for retouching. Any of the three recipes is a good starting place, but there is such a wealth of recipes to try in the old literature, its hard to settle on one!If a photographer leaves a legacy of work, or has an interesting lifes story, he or she becomes as much a part of history as the images, and we are primarily studying a biography."One omission in the book requires explantion (sic).
The details of manufacture were locked away, or worse, died with key development people. Although wet plate collodion photography was the standard for more than twenty years starting in 1851, and was the medium for the iconic photographs of the American Civil War and the Crimean War, the process was inconvenient (to say the least). This negative format is larger than what the manufacturer’s catalog recommends. The Stanley Dry Plate 4" x 5" Glass Plate Negatives Original Box 6 Pieces. The former are because of this peculiar reading of colors and the latter because of the shadows that are created. Beyond his undeniably innovative discoveries in photographic science and engineering, his greatest achievement was in changing the psychology of photography. And, when a product disappeared off the shelves, there was no getting it back; there was no home darkroom or cottage industry alternative. As I had no patience to wait I did not test this possibility.
This article will talk about a kind of retouching that has exactly this purpose: depositing opaque material on the negative in order to improve the final copy. For that, I almost only took care of the spots due to the limited reading of the spectrum that this homemade emulsion provides. http://www.thelightfarm.com/Map/DryPlate/Recipes/DryPlateSection.htm. Sometimes is possible, though, but the negative must be very good then. I was surprised to see how easy it is to fill in the light spots (which would turn out dark in prints) using the pencil. I made this picture on a homemade 18×24 cm glass dry plate.
Of course, using panchromatic films, retouching needs will be different. It took many decades to the photographic industry to developed panchromatic emulsions capable of having their silver halides “marked” even by that spectral region in which photons carry less energy.