Wetplate - closer to digital than 35mm?

The headline may sound strange - but, yesterday, during my first wetplate photoshooting using the Ambrotypie (see information here) de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrotyp… technique I felt like this way of working felt much closer to the digital work flow in taking photographs and seeing them immediatly on the display than 35mm.

Even though we just took 8 pictures in about 8 hours, the process of working on the pose, coating the plate with the chemicals in the dark room, 12 seconds to burn the image into the lightsensitive glass surface, back to the darkroom, and in nothing more than 3 minutes we where able to see the final result when holding the glass in front of a dark paper.

So why everybody says digital is that fast when some spend hours in front of the computer to get a final result?
And to take 36 good 35mm images mostly does not have the same good results in the quantity compared to the wetplate process - because we tend to work to fast?
And the 35 mm film needs to be developed (which mostly takes more than 1 minute...) and scanned and / or printed in the darkroom. So the process is cheaper, to take a picture may just take 1/4 seconds, but the process at all still takes a lot of time.

Is the "new technology" really a step forward when having in mind all the functions and overall the quality and endurance of the material?

Of course it's all about light and the intensity of the light and we where lucky with a 12 seconds light situation....and the plate has to dry now, needs to be varnished... but we will hardly get the idea to use pen and pencil to rework anything on this image hours later...


I would like to talk about your experiences with you and feel free to show us some of your work taken in any analog way and tell us the story from the first idea to the final picture!

Useful Links (feel free to send more!)

www.facebook.com/groups/collod… - facebook group for collodion friends

kollodium.blogspot.de/ (german) - Andreas Reh, Wetplate photographers blog with a lot of technical useful information

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Tabea.