5×7 Dry Plate | a 7 Image Story

5×7 Dry Plate | a 7 Image Story  5×7 dry plates were popular with photographers during the late 1800s and early 1900s.  How in the world did I get started on this project?  Well, I went to an estate sale.  The person selling part of their estate was a collector.  He had a 5×7 view camera in very good condition and a box of exposed 5×7 plates.  I won the bid on both items.  For camera details and more restored images, see 5×7 Dry Plate Restorations | a 7 Image Story.  After realizing I could scan the negative dry plates, I began to learn how to scan and restore print images from the 5×7 dry plate negatives.  Remember, these are 5″ x 7″ negatives capable of yielding very large prints.  The substrate of the dry plate is glass.  One must exercise caution when handling the sheet glass.  The sharp edges of the cut glass are lightly beveled to reduce the chance of getting cut.  More on handling will come later.

Now, a word about this particular image!  This post will display this image in 7 different ways as it gets restored.  The image appears to be a summer parade, probably the 4th of July, marching down a dirt street somewhere in small town USA.  From the dress of the band and the onlookers, the image was captured sometime in the early 1900s.  Also, notice the horses hitched to a wagon near the windmill.  From the other pictures in the box of dry plates, the town is likely in the upper midwest like Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Michigan.  Why did I pick this image?  It’s one of the better ones and it seemed appropriate for this July 4th week.  The following steps were used to restore the image:

1. Scan Dry Plate Negative  The exposed emulsion on the plates scratch and smudge very easily.  They must be picked up by the edges with no sliding against other plates or the packing sheets.  This plate was scanned using an Epson Perfection V600 flatbed scanner.  The scan was a 2400 bpi straight scan using 16 bit gray scale into a 471 MB TIFF file with no software fixes or enhancements on the inbound scan.  Although it seems obviously that a sharper scan should result from the emulsion side down, it worked out better for me to put the shiny side down.  See 5×7 Dry Plate | Negative Scanned for more detail information on handling, scan details, and file management.

2. Convert Negative to Positive  Now, the image scanned in the last step is a scanned negative.  Several methods will convert the scanned negative into a positive for printing.  For me, using the “curves” function in Aperture worked the easiest and fastest.  Set the “Range” to “Normal” before dragging the control points on the RGB curve up and down. Drag the top right corner to bottom right, and drag bottom left to top left, effectively inverting the curve.

3. Crop Edges  The beveled edges of the dry plate glass usually looked distorted and sometimes have smudges due to handling.  To make a nice print, the edges are generally cropped.  The Aperture crop function worked fine while keeping the same 5×7 scale.

4. Restore  Of course, the restoration step takes more time and effort than all other steps combined.  My restoration objective was to only restore the image to a new condition but not enhance it.  Aperture’s brush tools were used to restore the image including: retouch, skin smoothing, dodge, burn, and definition.  Also, a crop was necessary to remove large smudges which were not repairable.  The restoration process removed hundreds of age stops; dark or light spots mostly like due to the age of the dry plate.  It also removed or fixed smudges and scratches as well as fixed distortion due to liquid droplet spills on the emulsion.  The image is still not in a new condition, but it’s much better than is was.  Under magnification, small black spots can still be seen.

5. Black & White Print  After restoration, it only seem fitting and proper to display a standard black & white print much like a good photographer in the early 1900s would have developed in the darkroom.

6. Sepia Print  Sepia prints developed from B&W negatives remains popular.  Again, although I developed this print image in my digital darkroom, it can easily be developed in a traditional chemical darkroom. 

7. Antique Print  Antique prints developed from B&W negatives still remains popular.  Again, although I developed this print image in my digital darkroom, it’s easily developed in a traditional darkroom.

Each image will be posted individually this week with a bit more narrative under category 5×7 Dry Plate.

Click any image below for a slide show!