Portaits with a vintage lens.

I mentioned in a previous post that I started experimenting with portraiture using artificial lighting. I invested in two Fotodiox C-1600 lights:

 

And fitted each of them with 16 daylight balanced (5500K) CFLs. The CFLs are 100 W equivalent. 
I had read that a few wet-plate photographers were using them with good results for portraiture and still life  photography.


Unfortunately, even at my lens largest aperture, my exposure times with this set-up for portraits have been in the 30-40s range. Although this produces for the sitter an experience similar to what people went through in the late 1800s (meaning painful and unpleasant), it made portraiture very impractical.

I thought that part of the problem was using a modern lens with multi-coating, which possibly filtered out a lot of the UV light that collodion responds so well to. I decided to look for a fairly cheap vintage (and uncoated) lens and found a 10 in. Baush and Lomb brass lens:

At this point I have mounted the lens on a temporary black foamcore lens board with black tape. I just couldn't wait to get a lens board made to try it out.
This is the first portrait I made with the B&L lens:

Rachel.

This photograph has a very different quality than anything I have produced so far with my modern lens. It has a pretty soft focus, very shallow depth of field and evident distortions. It wasn't quite I expected but the aesthetic is growing on me very rapidly. I see a lot of potential with this lens.
In addition I am happy to report that my exposure time was only 12s. It seems that indeed the coating on my modern lens increases exposure time. However I also made a slight change to my chemistry, so I will have to do a side by side comparison to verify this conclusion.

Yesterday, a fellow photographer visited me to witness first hand the making of a wet-plate collodion photograph. I made a portrait of him in the same conditions as Rachel's image:

Marco.