Old methods for new photos

[gardener]

I went to a lecture this week, at the Icelandic national museum.
A curator from a regional museum has been learning how to take photographs the way they used to, on glass plates. There was a display of some of his work and I am amazed at the detail it is possible to capture. I had not really thought about it before but he explained that the process is/was more sensitive to red light than blue, which is why areas of sky tend to show little detail. He said that in the US the white women used to be powdered with potato starch to counteract the redness of their skin tones - otherwise they appeared to have very dark skins in the pictures and they did not like that. He also showed a metal neck-brace on a stand which was used to stabilize people if they were standing - they had to keep still for so long. A few photographic artists specialize in using this technique and he showed one picture of a skate-boarder in mid jump. You would think it impossible to take using a process which normally takes about a minute for exposure, he said it was the equivalent of ISO 1 film I think, but the photographer had used a huge array of floodlights from a Hollywood sale so he got this picture taken very quickly.
Very interesting indeed.