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Photo Forum / Film Photography / Darkroom / July 2004Daguerreotypes redux
I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) I'm wondering if anybody on this list has experience with this technique? -- Theo Benson, MA Grizzly Glen Photography www.chameleon.net/ursus >I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than >adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) >I'm wondering if anybody on this list has experience with this technique? I do not, but have been interested in this myself. If you find out let us know! kind regards, -travis > I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than > adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) > > I'm wondering if anybody on this list has experience with this technique? I never made any, but I saw one at the The Art Institute of Chicago. Definately worth seeing one. http://www.artic.edu/  Signature.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 17:10:00 up 1 day, 6:05, 4 users, load average: 4.02, 4.12, 4.22 > > I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than > > adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > > http://www.artic.edu/ Very cool link -- thanks! I used to be a Deputy Coroner. Often, I was called to a scene involving the death of an elderly person. Sadly, they often had generations of family photos and other memories stashed away. I always thought it a shame when there was no next of kin to take posession of the boxes of photos left behind. To me, discarding them was like erasing memories... At one scene, I found a wooden box with at least 20 Daguerreotypes in perfect condition. There were wedding scenes, some family portraits, and about 5 images of dead infants (it was common to photograph deceased children as a means of preserving their memory). I was fascinated by them, and obtained permission to give them to UCLA. -- Theo Benson, MA Grizzly Glen Photography www.chameleon.net/ursus > I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than > adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > Grizzly Glen Photography > www.chameleon.net/ursus There are actually quite a few people practicing Daguerreotypes. For starters see John S. Craig's site http://www.craigcamera.com This has links to both Daguerreotype and Wet Plate sites. Also see the arhives of the Alternative Processes mailing list at: http://www.usask.ca/lists/alt-photo-process/ This has links to the Alternative Processes FAQ and subscription instrucions. There are two methods of making Daguerreotypes, one of which, the Bequerel (Sp?) does not use Mercury. Signature--- Richard Knoppow Los Angeles, CA, USA dickburk@ix.netcom.com Ursus said: >>I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.)<< Ursus, I tried to Google information on the Daguerreotype Society, but it appears the links to their site no longer work. I believe that is the group who has members who do daguerreotypes as well as collect and restore old images. I saw a demo at the Eastman House several years ago where the process was shown by a member of that group, so it can be done. Google had many hits on history and how to do it. Bernie > I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than > adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) > > I'm wondering if anybody on this list has experience with this technique? Haven't done it, but I've thought a lot about updates to the process that likely would have been applied if it hadn't been replaced by wet plates around 1850. First, I'm certain you should be able to make a Daguerreotype on silvered glass, which means you could silver the glass immediately before sensitizing and avoid all the burnishing process needed for silver plated copper -- the silver would already be molecularly clean and have the same polish as the underlying glass substrate. Second, I think it should be possible to develop the exposed image in modern developers and gain a great deal of speed, as well as eliminating the hazards involved with mercury vapor development. What I don't know is whether the result of the latter would look like a Daguerreotype. SignatureI may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not going to Alcatwaz! -- E. J. Fudd, 1954 Donald Qualls, aka The Silent Observer Lathe Building Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/HomebuiltLathe.htm Speedway 7x12 Lathe Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/my7x12.htm Opinions expressed are my own -- take them for what they're worth and don't expect them to be perfect. Silvering glass sounds like an excellent way to improve both the quality of the finished plate, and a good way to save money! I wish I still had access to the "sputtering" machine I used to work with. Ionic deposition of metals onto just about anything. Imagine the precision of sputtering silver onto a glass plate... Theo Benson, MA Grizzly Glen Photography www.chameleon.net/ursus > Silvering glass sounds like an excellent way to improve both the quality of > the finished plate, and a good way to save money! > > I wish I still had access to the "sputtering" machine I used to work with. > Ionic deposition of metals onto just about anything. Imagine the precision > of sputtering silver onto a glass plate... In fact, either sputtering or true vapor deposition produce a film about as good as you get from chemical silvering, but the equipment required make them almost impossible to transport (if you were going to take your Daguerreotype apparatus into the field), and they're only cheaper if you do a lot of coating. Chemical silvering, on the other hand, can be done with two spray bottles of the two solutions (alkaline silver nitrate solution in one, reducer in the other, they're sold commercially for things like temporary coating of telescope mirrors to facility testing), and the glass could be precleaned and kept in distilled water bath to avoid having to transport nitric acid and such for super-cleaning. Pull a plate out of the storage bath, set it on a stand, spray the two solutions to apply the silver coating, wipe off any silver flock with wet cotton and pat down the coating to ensure it's seated on the glass, wash with acetone to rapid dry, and then into the sensitizing, total time from bath to first sensitizing chamber under ten minutes -- save you a half hour per plate compared with burnishing presilvered copper, and you could acid clean the glass plates at your leisure, in batches, in very little time per plate. To me, the much larger innovation would be in developing the exposed halide layer on the plate -- if that could be done with chemicals like metol, hydroquinone, or pyrogallol (that is, with modern developers as used for wet plates and newer processes since 1854), the biggest objection to long term use of Daguerreotypy would be removed (the Becquerel method of developing, which uses multi-day exposure to dim red light to bring up the image, is both an impossibly slow process and loses a great deal of plate speed compared to mercury vapor development, so I don't consider it a practical alternative). I think one might be able to get a Daguerreotype plate up into the range of ISO 1 (comparable to contact printing paper like Azo, giving exposures shorter than one second in bright light) just by use of an organic developer. I hope to test this at some point -- I have two 9x12 cm plate cameras, so all I'd need is a supply of 1 mm thick glass and silvering chemicals, plus the iodine crystals and materials to generate bromine and chlorine (both trivial, using household chemicals) for sensitizing. And a 9x12 cm Daguerreotype, if the look is preserved, would be something to behold indeed! Next beyond that would be an attempt to reproduce interference color Daguerreotypes -- much more difficult, since they have to be exposed through the glass of the plate, with a reflective surface (originally, liquid mercury) behind the halide layer, and no opague layer between glass and halide. Just producing the sensitive coating looks to be an adquate immediate challenge... SignatureI may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not going to Alcatwaz! -- E. J. Fudd, 1954 Donald Qualls, aka The Silent Observer Lathe Building Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/HomebuiltLathe.htm Speedway 7x12 Lathe Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/my7x12.htm Opinions expressed are my own -- take them for what they're worth and don't expect them to be perfect. On 7/4/2004 2:13 PM Donald Qualls spake thus: > I hope to test this at some point -- I have two 9x12 cm plate cameras, > so all I'd need is a supply of 1 mm thick glass and silvering chemicals, > plus the iodine crystals and materials to generate bromine and chlorine > (both trivial, using household chemicals) for sensitizing. And a 9x12 > cm Daguerreotype, if the look is preserved, would be something to behold > indeed! Hmm; perhaps too much to behold. One of the charms of dags (to me, at least) is their small size and jewel-like aspect. It would be interesting, though, to see a huge (by comparison) 9x12 image of that type. SignatureEverybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. - Noam Chomsky > On 7/4/2004 2:13 PM Donald Qualls spake thus: > [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > least) is their small size and jewel-like aspect. It would be > interesting, though, to see a huge (by comparison) 9x12 image of that type. I don't feel it would be overwhelming -- Daguerreotypes were tiny because they were expensive, and because the effort expands geometrically with plate size; that is, a 9x12 cm plate (done by conventionally burnishing a chemically silvered copper plate) is four times as much work as a 4.5x6 cm size (which was a pretty common size for Daguerreotypes). On silvered glass, a 9x12 cm plate is hardly any more work, and only costs pennies more, than a 6x4.5 or 6x9 plate, and it would be entirely practical to make Daguerreotypes as large as 16x20 (if you can borrow a suitably sized camera). The 9x12 size has some advantages, though -- it's big enough to see well without magnification of any kind, small enough that the cameras to make the plate are plentiful and inexpensive, it's a standard glass plate size from the gelatin dry plate era (again, contributing to plentiful cameras) -- and, perhaps most important, lenses rapidly get slower as sizes expand beyond the 9x12 cm or 4x5 inch size; f/4.5 is common in these sizes, but f/6.3, f/7.7, and even f/9 are more common in 10x15 cm or 8x10 inch sizes. Faster lens means shorter exposures, of course; coupled with improved plate speed from using modern developers (assuming that works), one might be able to take hand held Daguerreotypes in bright sun (though with the effort involved, I don't see doing it other than as a proof of possibility; even with a glass plate and modern developer, it's a lot of work to make a blurry Dag). Certainly the same could be done in smaller sizes, but the glass gets harder to work with below about 6x9 cm format -- it's much harder to accurately cut a piece of glass 2x3 inches than one 3x4 inches (at least in my limited glass cutting experience), and it's no more work to silver the larger plate than the smaller (the difference in cost for glass and silvering solutions is trivial, also, unless you're making dozens of plates one after another). SignatureI may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not going to Alcatwaz! -- E. J. Fudd, 1954 Donald Qualls, aka The Silent Observer Lathe Building Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/HomebuiltLathe.htm Speedway 7x12 Lathe Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/my7x12.htm Opinions expressed are my own -- take them for what they're worth and don't expect them to be perfect. >> On 7/4/2004 2:13 PM Donald Qualls spake thus: >> [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > it would be entirely practical to make Daguerreotypes as large as 16x20 > (if you can borrow a suitably sized camera). In Beaumont Newhall's book, "The Daguerreotype In America," he cites the common sizes: Whole plate, or 4/4 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches Half plate 4 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches Quarter plate 3 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches Sixth, or medium plate 2 3/4 by 3 1/4 inches Nineth plate 2 by 2 1/2 inches Sixteenth plate 1 3/8 x 1 5/8 inches He goes on to say... The fractions of the standard whole plate were approximate, for the pieces were trimmed to preserve more or less the proportion of 1:1.3. One ingenious Yankee found a way to cut ten ninths from a whole. Oversize plates were occasionally used. These "mammoth" plates, sometimes called double or 8/4, were not made in standard sizes. Southworth & Hawes boasted that their 13 1/2 by 16 1/2 inch daguerrotype of Hiram Power's popular sculpture, "The Greek Slave," had "nearly 100 more square inches than any plate shown outside of our rooms." But if we are to believe the statement that Gouraud showed, in Boston in 1840, plates of 480 square inches, made by Daguerre, their boast was idle. Signature.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 03:10:00 up 4 days, 16:05, 3 users, load average: 4.10, 4.20, 4.14 > In Beaumont Newhall's book, "The Daguerreotype In America," he cites the > common sizes: [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > Nineth plate 2 by 2 1/2 inches > Sixteenth plate 1 3/8 x 1 5/8 inches Sixth plate is close to a 116 negative, or a little bigger than 6.5x9 format, then; 9x12 cm is just over quarter plate (in fact, quarter plate adapters were very common in 9x12 cameras sold in England and the United States, because the 3x4 format film was much more easily obtained in the "inch" countries -- this, of course, decades before England adopted metric). Sixteenth plate is awfully close to 127 full frame (8 exposure size). > He goes on to say... > > The fractions of the standard whole plate were approximate, for the > pieces were trimmed to preserve more or less the proportion of 1:1.3. > One ingenious Yankee found a way to cut ten ninths from a whole. Heh. :) That's a neat trick indeed, especially if cutting was done after silvering; it would mean cutting the waste by at least 11%. > Oversize plates were occasionally used. These "mammoth" plates, > sometimes called double or 8/4, were not made in standard sizes. [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > are to believe the statement that Gouraud showed, in Boston in 1840, > plates of 480 square inches, made by Daguerre, their boast was idle. Well, I'm certainly glad I'm not the apprentice who mistakenly chose coarse rottenstone instead of rouge for the final burnishing step in making such a monster plate... SignatureI may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not going to Alcatwaz! -- E. J. Fudd, 1954 Donald Qualls, aka The Silent Observer Lathe Building Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/HomebuiltLathe.htm Speedway 7x12 Lathe Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/my7x12.htm Opinions expressed are my own -- take them for what they're worth and don't expect them to be perfect. > I am exploring the possibility of making Daguerreotypes. I have more than > adequate protection in place (for the mercury fumes, etc.) [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > Grizzly Glen Photography > www.chameleon.net/ursus I checked the links I posted earlier and found that they did not lead where I thought. A good source that DOES work is: http://www.newdags.com/ which has information on both type of Daguerreotypes. Richard Knoppow Los Angeles, CA, USA dickburk@ix.netcom.com |
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