Collodion du jour - 17

Untitled still life

I am still getting used to the way wet-plate collodion "sees" color. Although the images that I produce here are monochrome, their subject is not. Colors in the objects that are photographed are translated into different densities of silver - into different shades of gray.
The photo on the left surprised me very much. To help the delicate orchid stand out, I had set it on a vivid blue background. The white on blue jumped at me when I was setting up my shot. Little did I know that wet-plate collodion is very sensitive to the blue range of the light spectrum, rendering the background in the final image almost as white as the flower itself. On the other hand collodion has very little sensitivity to red hues, rendering the tomatoes in the previous untitled still life completely black...