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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

  5 years ago, I didn’t own a camera and knew nothing about
  photography. I saw a wet plate online and I was immediately 
  drawn to it, and thus my journey began.

  I was told early on that there was no way a non-photographer
  who has never owned a camera can figure out this archaic
  process from 1848. 45 days after that conversation, I had
  made my very first wet plate photo.

He may have been an amateur, but he appears to have had a significant number of resources at his disposal to get started. I can't help but feel like he left out a huge part of the story.

Also quoting yourself on the door to your studio?

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I don't really like the tone of "they said it couldn't be done, but I did it". When you don't have a day job and you have resources you can throw at an alternative process, it's not at all impossible to do good work. If you're trying to get by with rudimentary equipment and can't afford the time and money to experiment and learn how to get it right, then the task becomes more difficult.

Wet plate is a known quantity, with instructions online, workshops available, and suppliers are still in business.

He's doing some good work. If he were producing Autochromes or Lippman plates, I'd be more impressed. Those processes are almost lost, with a few successful experimenters only.

Edited: for tone

I wish we could diagnose this as a mild case of narcissism (maybe just unfounded smugness) and not be scratching our heads about what is going on with this guy.

Not really. He had a very successful ecommerce business[0], so he had some money to spend on his new hobby, which is a non trivial point I suppose, but as far as I can tell he picked up photography for the first time in his 40's.

[0] https://www.balkowitsch.com

Sounds like he followed Phil Greenspun's instructions [1]!

"The Easy Way

Step 1: Read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

Step 2: With your new $250/hour skills, build a database-backed Web service for a Fortune 500 company.

Step 3: Take the money collected in Step 2 and purchase a couple of Canon or Nikon bodies and every lens in the respective manufacturer's product line.

The only problem with this approach is that, once you've got a cabinet filled with lenses, you still have to figure out which to take out for a particular project and how to use it effectively. If you're rich, read "get" in the following headlines to mean "take out of cabinet". If you're not rich, read "get" to mean "buy from one of the photo.net recommended retailers"."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030401081311/http://www.photo....

Most major metros have camera lens rentals that let you get access to glass that would normally be out of reach.

Renting a 200mm F2 was a blast since it's a very specific lens that I could never afford but was amazing to see what was possible with it.

>Also quoting yourself on the door to your studio?

I took that to mean he expects the studio to outlast him. The plaque serves as a way to communicate his intentions for the studio to those that will inherit it.

That's how I read it too. Maybe a bit presumptuous to add such a plaque right away and not, say, as a clause in a will or something – the building might be gone in five years, after all. But I didn't really read it as self aggrandizing.

In context with the content and tone of the post, it reads as self-aggrandizement—a seemingly not uncommon affectation among those who have attained notoriety in their own lifetime.

And while one might regard it as distasteful—it’s certainly tiresome, in my experience— there’s material and psychological benefits to holding that mindset (along with a variety of non-trivial downsides.)

How does he expect a building that flimsy to last particularly long?

I took it to mean he was doing the old-timey thing of putting up a plaque saying the name of the business, a slogan, and the proprietor. (In commerce, quote marks tend to indicate emphasis or a slogan.)

Wow, I had misread his quote as,

"Learn everything about modern photography outside this door."

Kind of like that better. ;)

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