Take a portrait negative that is no longer of any use, and immerse it in a weak solution of hydrofluoric acid. The film will leave the glass. It is then washed and returned to the glass support. By stretching the film one way or the other, and allowing it to dry in this position, the most amusing prints can be made. Keep your fingers out of the acid!
[PHOTOGRAPHS WITHOUT LIGHT.]
A curious experiment showing that a photographic dry-plate can be otherwise affected than by light, so as to form an image upon it, is the following:
An image of copper in relief is necessary—a penny will do for this purpose. Place an unexposed dry-plate in a normal pyro developer, and on it lay the copper coin. After about five minutes or so, remove the penny, fix and wash the plate, when a perfect image of the penny will be found on it.
[ELECTRIC PHOTOGRAPHS.]
Similar experiments to that described above have been carried out by Prof. Fernando Sanford. He placed a coin on a dry-plate and connected it with the terminal of a small induction coil, capable of giving a spark of three or four millimeters, while a piece of tin foil upon the opposite side of the plate was connected with the other terminal of the coil.
Several negatives were made in this way, the accompanying photograph, Fig. 58, being from one of them. With one exception, they all show a fringe around them, due to the escape of the charge from the edge of the coin, which accounts for the formation of the dark ring observed around the breath figures made upon glass.
Later on he undertook to photograph in the same way objects insulated from the photographic plate, and has since made negatives of coins separated from the plate by paraffine, shellac, mica, and gutta percha. The accompanying photograph, Fig. 59, was made with the coin insulated from the photographic plate by a sheet of mica about 0.04 mm. thick. The mica was laid directly upon the film side of the plate, and the coin was placed upon it and connected to one terminal of the small induction coil already mentioned. A circular piece of tin foil of the circumference of the coin was placed upon the glass side of the plate directly opposite the coin, and was connected to the other terminal of the induction coil. The little condenser thus made was clamped between two boards, and was covered up in a dark room. Two small discharging knobs were also attached to the terminals of the induction coil, and were separated by a space of less than a millimeter, so that, when a single cell was connected with the primary coil, the spark between the knobs seemed continuous.