It is a sobering thought that athough photography using emulsions has only been with us since 1877, the whole technology is in the process of being closed off, having been replaced in the mass photographic market with digital techniques. Demand for traditional film and paper products has been quickly falling away, evident in the loss of enormous diversity in emulsioned products, for example lithographic films and papers, only ten or so years ago the basis for the graphic arts industry, now almost completely vanished.
Consider also that photographic material manufacturing has since its inception operated on the principle of mutual secrecy - small variations in emulsion recipes and manufacturing techniques control the enormous range of behaviour possible within emulsioned film and paper, and this knowledge, gained at great time and expense in research is locked within the archives of the manufacturers, and will not emerge. As photographic chemists and technicians retire and eventually fall off the perch much additional knowledge is also lost, practical data not recorded which has been an integral and essential part of the manufacturing process.
At Silverprint we have always had a certain fascination with emulsion techniques at a basic level, and in 1995 threw a lot of effort into producing the book 'Silver Gelatin', which has remained the only book dealing with self-coated emulsion. And now it seems it may be the time to rally the troops again.
Consequently we are kicking off something which may or may not bear fruit, but certainly seems worth testing, an archive of photo emulsion data and techniques at all levels, as an integral part of this website. Initially we are putting up a number of books in PDF format, all now out of copyright including the highly comprehensive book by Wall. The intention is to provoke interest and discussion, and hopefully bring in contributions from what's left of the industry itself. There is a lot of material lined up to include at the outset, but for starters the first scanned-in text is the dry-plate section from 'Wilson's Quarter Century in Photography', written in 1887 just as modern emulsions were arriving, and including contributory chapters from luminaries of the time such as William Abney and even George Eastman, amongst 300 others.
The APUG site has been running a number of emulsion oriented threads starting in 2006, and there are links to this opposite, & off the emulsion archive menu.
