Foursquare ‘Wet Plate Project’ photos
Snowboarding shot in a very old-fashioned way.
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Foursquare Outerwear have just launched a new photography initiative, The Wet Plate Project.
It has been led by photographer Ian Ruhter who has been using the the ancient wet plate photography technique to shoot the likes of team riders Andreas Wiig, Alek Oestreng and Pat Moore.
This process uses an 8" x 10" Deardorff camera and glass plates coated in various, slightly dangerous, chemicals to capture gritty, detailed metallic images.
The images need to be developed immediately by being dipped in potassium cyanide, and so requiring Ruhter to set up a makeshift mountainside laboratory on the shoot.
Due to the challenge of short exposure times, the only other photographer to ever use wet plate to capture movement was Eadweard Muybridge, who photographed a man riding a horse in 1878.
Says Ruhter: "Digital is a sign of our times: we want things now. But with that mindset, we sacrifice so much. I prefer to see the imperfections—that is what makes us individual, unique. The same principles should be applied to a photo and it’s process.”
They've also made a series of videos showing what went into each shot.
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Foursquare ‘Wet Plate Project’ photos (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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