This workshop will explore the different ways light sensitive photographic emulsion can be used to make dry-glass plate negatives, false tintypes, and black and white prints on a variety of substrates such as paper, fabric and stone. After an introduction to the process and its variations, participants will learn to prepare and coat a glass or aluminium plate and to expose these in a camera. We will then develop the images as a negative or a positive, ready to be printed from on the next day.

Who is it For?

This course is aimed at confident photographers who would like to push the boundaries and explore black and white image making using a new approach and is suitable for confident beginners and advanced photographers.

This will be a physical course, delivered in person at our UWE Frenchay Campus. 

The course price includes all materials and PPE.  

Price: £249.00 Full Price / £199.00 Concessionary & UWE Alumni Price

Date:  13th & 14th May 2024 

This will be a physical course, delivered in person at our UWE Frenchay Campus.

For more information please email [email protected]

Details of our Cancellation Policy and Conditions of Booking

Click on the course title above for information on the course tutor and the course outline. 

Concessionary rate prices: We offer a 20% discounted concessionary rate to UWE staff, UWE alumni (including previous CFPR CPD attendees), anyone reliant on state benefits for their income, anyone currently in full-time education (worldwide) or part-time higher education (UK), and those who are retired.

Course Description

Course Structure:

Day 1:
We will start with a health and safety induction and then move onto an introduction to working with liquid light, preparation and then on to subbing of substrates to make in-camera negatives or positives and prints. There will be a practical demonstration and photoshoot with a large format camera in the gardens of Frenchay Campus. We will then process the images in the darkroom.

Day 2:
Participants will be making prints from our negatives from day 1 in the darkroom: contact printing and enlargements onto materials coated with liquid light previously.

About Frank Menger: 

Frank Menger works as Research Fellow in the Centre for Print Research and Senior Lecturer for Photography for Foundation Studies in the School of Arts at UWE Bristol. His interests lie in historic photographic and photomechanical printmaking practices, with a specialist interest in wet-plate
collodion photography. In his practice, he researches and combines analogue and digital photographic and printmaking techniques, drawing on a vast experience of traditional techniques combined with novel and innovative approaches.

Frank has extensively taught analogue darkroom photography practices in his previous roles at Goldsmiths’ College and at the University of Wales, Newport, and is currently in the process of building a hybrid digital darkroom in a box, based on the principle of the Afghan Box Camera.

The course is limited to a maximum of 4 participants so please sign up early to secure your place.