Saturday, May 5th is World Wet Plate Collodion Day 2012!

“Alane’s Chair,” © Todd Vinson (segment of 11×14 collodion on black glass)

You know what that means! You need to be ready to make a wet plate collodion image and upload it this weekend. THIS weekend.

Don’t panic. Go through your collodion supplies for essentials like, potassium cyanide, ether, cadmium bromide, potassium iodide, etc., and make sure you’ve got everything.

If you make your own collodion from scratch, the next step is to get in your time machine and go back a week or two to mix collodion. This way, your new batch of collodion will have time to clear and be ready to use now.

Those days you gain by traveling backwards should also give you plenty of time to mix fresh handmade developer, cut, polish and wrap stacks of glass, check your specific gravity of our silver nitrate bath, and make sure everything else collodion-related is good to go. If you finish preparing early, don’t travel back to today yet. Just hang out last week and let today roll around naturally. Today will come soon enough.

By then (meaning, now), you will forget what you did last week and why you did it, but you’ll check out Mapping the Edge today and see this post and begin to panic, because you didn’t realize that World Wet Plate Day, 2012 was just a few days away! And you’re not ready!

Suddenly, in a fleeting moment of clarity, you’ll remember that time machine under an old tarp in the shed. You’ll get it out, dust it off, and fire it up. Remember to adjust the choke. You’ll strap yourself in and go back a week or two so you can mix fresh collodion and give it time to clear before World Wet Plate Day 2012 catches you by surprise. Again.

Go ahead. You’ve got time. I’ll wait…