A deliberate in camera double exposure portrait of David Bremner was made in August 2022. An interesting day out for the Sanderson to celebrate a modern recreation of an old aeroplane and it's creator whilst paying homage to the family story that inspired it.

I elected to make this faint double exposure as it's very much a signature of the past, making sure the viewpoint was changed between exposures. The plate carrier leaked a bit, unsurprisingly as the strong sunlight was shining right into the darkslide slot, but I don't object to the intrusion. It's almost like the camera wanted to have some creative input too.

The Unicum Shutter has been giving issues a while and the camera had sat idle since 2006, but I really wanted to use this camera for this outing and repaired the shutter and serviced three plate carriers. Given that this Dallmeyer lens is coming up on 120 years old the clarity is really rather good. Our visual history has been handed down to us from such creations and I am delighted the old Sanderson is up and running again.

Five exposures were made during this opportunity, the fuller story and other images are on a separate page.

When this Sanderson joined the collection one of the plate carriers had this glass negative inside. Glass plates were out of common usage by the 1950s, but some die hard studio photographers persisted. This strongly lit portrait is hard to date, the formal dress and hair style is suggesting 1940s to me. Rather than allow it to sit in obscurity, I have decided to publish it here, as it does bear sufficient witness marks to indicate it was made using this camera.

In 1861 the Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell whose most celebrated work concerns magnetism, electricity and electromagnetic fields, created the first colour photograph. He achieved this by making three exposures of a tartan ribbon, each through a different coloured filter - red, blue and yellow. The resulting negatives were then made into positives, and all three were then projected through their respective filters onto a common screen. This additive process results in a colour image on the screen. As a homage to this event, I decided to have a go myself. I elected to use the common additive colours used today, known as RGB - or Red, Green and Blue. So I set up a suitable still life with only natural light from one side, a mirror to shine some light through the back of the glasses and made my three exposures. I compensated about three stops for the rather dark filters I found. These were then processed in a suitably vintage tank, and the developer was left in too long deliberately, to punch up the contrast and was developed on the warm side. Just to really give it the aged look, the wash was freezing cold to really mess up the emulsion. As I don't have one projector that takes quarter plate, let alone three identical ones, the negatives were projected onto paper, photographed then combined on the computer to finish the process.