Transcription progress

The 100 page notebook has been transcribed into a Pages document. That is what a MAC calls its word processor. Photos have been placed, numbered, and named properly. Everything has been printed out as a PDF, bound, and is in hand to read from. It will not be put on line as it is very fragmented; it makes sense to me and helps me to remember what I did and want to do.
My skills are increasing with the MacBook and Pages. More photographs have been taken in order to flesh out everything that was done. Such photos are a shot of my darkroom door, a shot of a measuring cup with a darkroom thermometer and film canisters in it, and one of a small tray that just fits a 4x5 plate with calcium carbonate on it and a bottle of EverClear beside it. That kind of thing. I know what everything is but a new person would need to see pictures lacking hands on experience.
The local hardware store has supplied me with a stack of plates to coat and emery cloth to sand them with. This batch will be coated thinly with Formazo to see if the edge artifact of picture framing goes away. The experiment will also tell how fast a thin emulsion will dry.

emulsion application methods

My methods of emulsion application are self taught from the web. There was a you tube video of emulsion being poured, and although not actually dry plate emulsion, it was enough to get me started. I tried to copy that last year with enough success to do it again this year.
Emulsion pouring by hand is my basic technique. It is being revisited. New information is being processed and I will pour in the air by hand again. A technique resulted that works lats year. It is a thick emulsion that is not run off but allowed to gell fully thick. That solved my edge problems and gave me perfect plates.
The same technique with a different emulsion led me to try different ways of applying the emulsion. Edge problems of a different sort entered the fray. To get rid of them I've tried scrapeing emulsion onto a plate from edge pieces of glass. This is more in line with The Light Farm methods, without the taped edgs on the Puddle Pusher. Old thin glass was put in the center of new thick glass edges. It works and the edge artifact of picture framing is all but gone.
Now I have two ways of coating plates that are very easy to do and work perfectly.

The Light Farm contributor

The Light Farm is where most of what I'll publish next will go. It is best, I think, to have one place where the newest to this art can go to find information.
The Light Farm
I wrote an article and it was posted there; as a contributor, I urge others to do likewise.
Article by Michael Carter

My own web site will be maintained but not to the extent that I had planned. You can read about what I'm going to do there:
Dry Plate Photography on studiocarter