I am copying/digitising some old family photographs taken by my late father-in-law. Some of these are glass plate negatives shot in the 1950s and feature sailing on the Thames? My father-in-law was not a photographer as such in that he took photographs to record things rather than because he was interested in photography, so I'm surprised that he shot glass plates. The plates themselves are small - 2 3/8" x 1 3/4" which is an odd size, and are in Ilford boxes. I would be interested to find out what sort of camera would have been used and whether it was fairly old when he used it so any info would be appreciated. The use of such small plates is intriguing given the date and undoubted messy loading and processing involved but that said the results were not too bad.
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Hi Paul. Ilford was still introducing new pictorial glass plate varieties into the 1950s. Given how well the motion is frozen I suspect this may have been taken on HP S, a new high speed type introduced in 1952 as a glass plate but only later as a flat film. He may have been guided towards a high speed variety. Do you have any details of the plate type from the packaging?
Thanks Michael. I have looked them up. What puzzles me is the use of plates when film was easily available. It seems a complicated solution to me!
These are Vest Pocket (VP) size plates and there were a number of cameras made to take this size. It was also a standard roll film size, too. A great image!