wet plate process

noun

1. a photographic process, in common use in the mid-19th century, employing a glass photographic plate coated with iodized collodion and dipped in a silver nitrate solution immediately before use.

Example Sentences

For the photographs of the Civil War battlefields in “Last Measure,” Ms. Mann used the very demanding 19th-century collodion wet plate process.

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The collodion wet plate process, a very inconvenient form of photography which required the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed within the span of about 15 minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field, was invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer.

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That got him thinking about the history of photography, which in turn led him to learning the wet plate process.

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For someone who yearned to get away from the instant gratification of digital, Mr. Hawkey found the wet plate process was just the thing.

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About the middle of the last century the wet plate process, so called because the sensitized collodion film must be kept moist during exposure, came into general use, and the astronomers of that period were not slow to avail themselves of the advantages of a more sensitive process, which in 1872, in the skillful hands of Henry Draper, produced the first spectrum of a star.

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