white snow backstory: I got glass plate holders for the 9×12 camera off eBay recently and they still had undeveloped glass plates in there. Destroyed the first one by looking (didn’t know there was something still in there) and tried developing the other two to see if they had images on them, which would have been mighty cool. Unfortunately, someone else has had a look in the maybe 100 years since they got in there, so all of them came out totally pitch black.
(I must say I don’t understand how people did dry plate photography for any length of time – every negative is a glass plate. Take 50 pictures and you basically need new furniture just to store the negatives. Or did they just make prints and then got rid of the negatives back then?)
Anyway, I then re-used the fixer chemicals on a normal film, without noticing that it was full of, uhm silver-something crystals I think it is? I’ve never been good in chemistry. A lot of silver in the old emulations, that’s for sure. Probably very healthy too.
That 100 year old silver(?) is now firmly embedded in my modern vanity snapshot. And makes it look like I let the negative fall to the ground a couple times. Which I also did but that’s not where most of the white specks are from.
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