19th Century-Style Jerusalem Pics

Hi All,

 

I stumbled upon a Photoshop action for replicating the Gum Bichromate printing

process ( Gum Bichromate Print

offset=20), and I decided to try to apply it to some shots I took in and around

Jerusalem a couple of summers ago. I concentrated on the major Christian sites

b/c of 19th century Europeans' predilection for producing lots of images in the

Near East.

 

I realize there are some glaring problems with the 19th century-ness of some of

them (dress, stopped action in dark places, etc.), but welcome your critiques

and criticisms...

 

http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=787116

 

By the way, if anyone has any other links to 19th century stylings for

Photoshop, please do share.

Your pictures look still just too modern and "crisp" to be mistaken for 19th century photography. Shoot only with a normal lens perspective, add vignetting and use less depth-of-field. By they way, VanDerLee's <b><a href="http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins_oldmovie_examples.html">OldMovie</a></b> plugin does a great job tranforming digital images into "authentic" vintage photographs.

The women in one of your photos - did they dress like that in the 19th century?

I agree with Bueh. Remeber that 19th century photos will have mostly been taken on large format wooden cameras mounted on a trupod and with a quite restricted range of focal lengths around the standard length.

 

The dynamic range of these emulsions was quite low so often the sj is completely blown out and the photographer has concentrated on getting the main subject only.

 

Your results look too grainy to me. The size of the old photographic plates was so big that they were often capable of rendering very high detail even when used with processes that reduced detail such as waxed negatvies etc.

 

Here is a reconstruction of a mid 19th century photographer at work and his assistant is working the portable darkroom for a wet plate process. It can't have been easy!<div></div>

Thanks for the criticisms everyone. I'm going to keep working at it. Colin - from what I've seen, Gum Bichromate photos were all pretty grainy. It was a biproduct of the emulsion.