Canada is a cold winter place much of the year. How can I do a project to photograph Canada and not do winter shooting? That seems wrong, so got to figure out how to do wet plate in winter time.
I have a darkroom trailer with a furnace in it but there are safety concerns. Wet plate photographs use ether and alcohols in its productions, those fumes are potentially ignitable (explosion!). I have heard from different people that the ether gas ignition point would require an extremely high level of fumes, others have said the amount of fumes do not need to be that high to ignite. To be safe it is best to believe the later people.
So my problem when winter shooting is keeping myself and the chemicals warm, and NOT BLOWING MYSELF UP in the process. The chemicals need to be kept at a certain temp to be viable shooting in winter conditions. You also need to make various changes to the chemicals, which I am still learning.
As I go over how to shoot wet plate images during the wintertime in my head I think the dangers would be somewhat eliminated if I remove the storage of the collodion from inside the trailer and move the pouring of the plate to outside the trailer. The only time I would then be adding ether fumes to the darkroom trailer is when I carry the plate in and put it inside the silver bath, then when I develop. There will still be some fumes but doing the pours and keeping the bottles of collodion outside should cut down on fume-danger/totals quite a bit.
If the collodion is stored outside, then it is going to get cold, so I need to figure away to keep it at proper temperature. Maybe a warm water bath of some kind, or an electric/battery (no sparks, no flame) heating device in the collodion cooler.
I need to figure out the safe way to do this, still in the thinking part but the project requires winter images, so got to figure a way to get this done.
Note* Right now I store my collodion in the trailer, inside camping coolers. I rarely smell any ether fumes until I open up the cooler, and when I put the lid back on, the odor from the fumes dissipates very quickly.
