A few years ago, a large wildfire ripped through more than 40,000 hectares of forest near the city where I live. This past summer, I drove through the area for the first time, and I was fascinated to see what the landscape has become.

There are the obvious signs of devastation, of course, entire stretches of burned dead trees and scorched earth. However, there is already a lot of regrowth happening, often around the devastation.

I plan to explore the area more thoroughly in the coming months and develop a series of photographs that showcase the effects of the wildfire.

I intend to shoot the series using my Kodak 3A folding camera, an old folding bellows camera with a simple lens and shutter built in 1910. I load the camera with hand-coated dry plates from Zebra. The plates are 3 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches in size. I shot these plates at ISO 1 and developed them in POTA, a simple developer made of phenidone and sodium sulphite in water.

They are contact printed on Ilford Art 300, a multigrade cotton rag printing paper with a beautiful texture and slightly warm tone.

The developer is extremely soft-working and designed to tame high contrast films. I have found these plates to be highly susceptible to building unwanted density and contrast, especially with typical developers. The POTA works beautifully and preserves much shadow detail without completely blowing out the high values.

There is still quite a contrast range in the plates, but the detail in the burned trunks is what I was after more so than the detail in the brighter background areas. Shooting plates like these in this way is always a venture into the unknown, but POTA has made the journey much more predictable.