A decade ago and 169 years after the daguerreotype process was announced, two people on opposite sides of the globe launched websites devoted to the contemporary genre, almost simultaneously. The following is a email exchange from which cdags.org was born.

“Alan,
Thank you very much for your email. I was about to send one to you with a similar message. When I decided to create a dag forum I wanted a single place for daguerreotypists to meet and discuss. When I saw you also had a forum I just about fell over. I had no intention whatsoever of having a competing forum and have been vexing all day about the problem. Your idea of pooling our efforts is great and I would very much like to team up with you on a single online daguerreian community and resource. I was also planning on having a gallery, links, etc. in my site but hadn’t gotten very far into the code.

I could have my dagforum.com domain redirect to your contemporarydaguerreotypes.info and my forum would then be linked in your site. Also, I could inbed links to your site in mine so they’d act more like one site. I’m not sure what sort of web background you have but I do a considerable amount of web programming at work (mostly PHP, MySQL, and Javascript) and would be willing to help you on your site if you would like the help.

Thanks again for emailing me first and I’m so sorry I popped up a site while you were working on essentially the same thing!

I look forward to working with you,
Jon

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 6:12 PM, Alan Bekhuis <alan@casedimage.com> wrote:
Dear Jon Lewis

Great minds think alike, I have been working on setting another website so
there would be a forum for contemp. daguerreotypists.  When I saw yours
today I felt like being in WHF Talbots position when he heard about this
photo process in France in early 1839!  I am thinking now what to do, as
its been rather taxing getting contemporarydaguerreotypes.info up and
going, espicially getting the galleries functioning so i’d like to see
something come of it.

What do you think about pooling our efforts somewhat? I could delete my
forum but change the forum link in contemporarydaguerreotypes.info to your
forum? To get everyone talking in the same space  (at my count there are
35 modern daguerreians) rather than two competing forums.  A return
arrangement might be me putting up the static stuff on
contemporarydaguerreotypes.info – artist images, links, resources, images
of equipment. You could send me stuff and I will post it.

I plan to be travelling to Daguerreian society this year in DC, if your
going I look forward to meeting you.

Best regards
Alan Bekhuis”