Dry plate

Dry plate

Emission and Absorption, ca. 1800-1870

Published in John C.D. Brand, Lines of Light, 2017

Scientific photography became routine when, in the late 1870s, the collodion emulsion gave way to the dry plate, a suspension of silver halide in gelatin. The dry plate had good shelf life and worked well in the nonvacuum ultraviolet; moreover, gelatin helped the response by reacting with halogen atoms, arresting their recombination with silver. Exposure times fell by another order of magnitude.

Dry gelatin ‘Photo-mechanical’ plates – their significance in the evolution of scientific & technical photography

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Journal Information

Published in The Imaging Science Journal, 2023

Alan Hodgson

The predominant gelatin dry plate technologies of the 1890s were based around silver bromide. The capability of silver bromide emulsions for line work had already been demonstrated in 1880, coated with a thickness that did not require an intensification step [37]. It has been noted above that the publications on spectral sensitivity suggest that at least the Ilford Process plates were of pure bromide formulation.

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Emission and Absorption, ca. 1800-1870

Dry gelatin ‘Photo-mechanical’ plates – their significance in the evolution of scientific & technical photography