For speed work outside one needs the Seed Graflex, Lumiere Sigma or Hammer Red Label. However, although very fast, the Lumiere Sigma is a very difficult plate for many workmen to handle, because the grain is coarse and it tends toward extreme contrast. Also, the emulsion is easily frilled.
For all colored subjects, especially those containing reds and greens, the Wratten Panchromatic or the Cramer Spectrum are very necessary to good results.
I find many photographers, including some commercial men, are timid about using these plates. Possibly they gave them a half-hearted trial and cast them aside, or have been told that they were hard to work. Color plates have made a wonderful progress in the past two years, and if you had any thing against them, give them another trial.
I will also say right here that, if conditions arose whereby I had to con fine myself to one plate for all my work, the Wratten Panchromatic would be my choice, as I consider it the best all-round plate on the market today, although a trifle higher in price. It is a single-coated plate with very thin emulsion, has a wide exposure and development latitude, fixes and dries rapidly, is backed and is all-color sensitive. It lends itself very quickly to plate manipulations, that is, intensification and reduction, both mechanically and with chemicals, and is a very clean working plate.
I may seem a little over-enthusiastic about this plate, but I am quite sure the same opinion is shared by many other workmen, and is formed from con siderable experience.
There is a great deal of work, such as furniture, pianos, and some copies, that will need a yellow filter—that is, yellow correction. For these, you will use a plate that is sensitive to yellow, such a plate being the Cramer Iso, Stand ard Orthonon, Commercial Ortho film, and, of course, the Wratten Panchro matic.
For flashlight and blow-lamp work, to obtain the best effect, the plate should be at least a little sensitive to yellow, and possess all possible speed. The leading workers in banquet photography and high-class flash work use the Imperial Flash Light, a plate of English manufacture. Portrait film takes its place very well.
Too much stress cannot be placed on the benefits to be obtained by back ing the ordinary plate, even though double-coated. While it may seem a great
deal of extra work to do this, I can assure you that it pays and you will find that many of the leading operators back all their plates, or use films. A nega tive made on a backed plate has much more crispness and brilliancy than an unbacked negative.
There are many backing formulas, but the one I use and like as well as any, and one which is quickly. and easily put on, is ordinary opaque. The best way is to apply it to the glass side of a plate with a wide brush and then place it in a drying-box until thoroughly dry before inserting in the plate-holder. If in a hurry, though, just slip a black piece of paper over the wet opaque, smooth it down and insert in the plate-holder. This latter method may be a little hard on the plate-holders, which makes the drying-box plan preferable.
In a chapter on dark-room work, I will go into more extended detail as to the handling of various plates to produce the best results.
In the matter of plates and films, as in lenses, it seems to me far prefer able to have two or tiiiko varieties that one knows thoroughly than a large assortment with which one is not entirely familiar. Every make of plates has its peculiarities which can be used to one's own advantage in work of various kind's, and it is better to know your plates and films well than to work in a hit and-miss fashion.
I have found that I can obtain much better results by using as slow a plate as a particular piece of work will stand. In this way, one has more latitude and it is cleaner working: It is surprising how good some of the old-timers used to get their nega tives on a very slow plate. I had the privilege, a few years ago, of looking over the Brady Collection in the War Department at Washington, which was made in Civil War' times, and was very much astonished at the wonderful results he obtained with that slowest possible type of plate—the wet plate. The work that was done on the first dry plates, twenty-five to thirty years ago, was also remarkable, so one can but come to the conclusion that it is not so much the plate as a knowledge of how to work with what you have. The photographers of years ago had but little choice and they learned to make the most of it.