Good to see people willing to do things the hard way.
Wet plate was the only way in the olde days and an “extreme” photographic collection of wet plates from then is the Holtermann Collection held in Sydney, Australia, http://blog.sl.nsw.gov.au/holtermann/ for info and links.
Amazing things done back then, his largest wet plates measured an amazing 1,36 x 0,95 metres, yes, metres. That’s about 53 x 37 inches.
The detail in those old Holtermann plates is superb, basically grainless and limited only by the lenses of the day. Get into zoom mode in a few of them and see the detail.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.