Recently the cdags site has developed some bugs which have now been addressed by the magic wand of our old admin and web sorcerer Jon Lewis. The forums are now back up and the Wiki is also visible.

Cdags may be soon be transitioning to some new ownership soon but will remain the online spiritual home of many a modern daguerreotypist and an archive of modern daguerreotypy that we have detailed over the years.

Chi: the circulating life energy that in Chinese philosophy is thought to be inherent in all things

Macabre: dwelling on the gruesome, tending to produce horror in a beholder

Chimacabres come out at night.  They are around during the day too of course, but the night is when they really thrive.  In the dark it’s harder to tell if you’re face to face with a fellow person, or if it’s a chimacabre in front of you, and they don’t even have faces.  No, they are vicious, purely instinctual, unforgiving. They read you with the speed of a car commercial disclaimer, immediately sniff out the soft spot, and burrow in mercilessly.  Once under their spell, escape is a struggle, as they are as alluring as dangerous. They vary greatly in their ranks.  Some feed often, while others only need one hit to fulfill their life purpose.  Some may leave you in shambles just minutes upon encounter, while others plant pernicious seedlings, which will erode your foundation decades later.  It takes a while to build up immunity to chimacabres, and one is never fully safe, as they keep evolving and following trends.

            These gruesome creatures are actually our own off-shoot.  Through eons, their essence has been shaped by the foul sludgy runoff from the continuous spiritual distillation of humanity.  Our communal subliminal fears and basic desires, refined, enlarged, and reinforced by existential self-perpetuation, remain their favorite delicacies. 

Although chimacabres evolved alongside human species in such a way as to be visually indistinguishable with the naked eye, by pure chance, I discovered that spectral sensitivity of daguerreotype technique, when combined with special lighting, allows for photographic capture of their inner core.  Presented here are five 4x5in plates of first clear specimens I was able to portray.  I hope to find and succeed in capturing more in the future.

I strongly believe that these images represent the first time ever that daguerreotype technique has been combined with light painting.

Thank You,
Anton

  Daguerreotype, the first truly successful and, in the eyes of many through history, the most beautiful photographic technique, was introduced to the world in summer of 1839, so this year marks 180^th anniversary of Photography.  Congratulations.

  After two major technical improvements were added to the original process as announced by Daguerre, improvements aimed at reducing exposure times and strengthening the adherence of image to plate, the following basic procedure of making each image was set henceforth. A plate of copper coated with pure silver is buffed to an absolute mirror surface, sensitized with fumes of elemental iodine and bromine, exposed in camera, developed in fumes of mercury, fixed with hypo, and then coated with gold by gilding.  The elegant simplicity of chemistry involved should not however be mistaken for ease of overall procedure, pitfalls are a plenty and too much can depend on the smallest seemingly unimportant and thus overlooked stop.   Some of the chemistry is also highly toxic, and should be treated with extreme respect and caution.  However, it’s all worth it, as when properly made and examined, a truly fine daguerreotype plate has never failed to bring a sense of awe to viewers of today as in early middle of 19^th century.

  I have been working with Daguerreotype medium for about 4 years now.  After having worked with other analog photographic methods for about quarter of a century prior, I fell in love with this technique for its incredible physical presence and appearance, and the possibilities I saw in taking that further.  In the fall of last year that I spent some length of time in the darkroom making 4-10 images per day.  Erasing, buffing, fuming, developing, erasing, repeating…  A few ideas were tested and tested again, a few new ones emerged, merged with others, opened possibilities.  As things got more and more complex, I decided to slow down a bit, and to produce a few small bodies of work, which would be built upon single variations of Daguerreotype process I’m planning to combine and utilize as part of my work with in the future.

  Below is the first such illustrative body of work, completed in early April.  First an introductory ‘straight’ plate, made with all traditional methods as have been practiced since 1840s, and appearing as representational as any semi-abstract daguerreotype can be. The other 5 are variations of same subject, which explore possibilities of color within this traditionally monochromatic medium.  The aim was to control placement of cool and warm tones and keep them interspersed within the same plate, and to be able to switch around their placement like in Variants #2 and #3.   In addition to color, I wanted to explore the possibility of creatively using the inherently reflective quality of the daguerreotype plates in areas void of image particles.

  There’s no way to accurately and fully convey via a screen how these 4×5 plates appear when one is holding them, letting the light reflect from different angles, paying attention to the color and pattern changes.  Daguerreotype colors shift their hue and saturation with angle of view and lighting.  There can also be observed a pattern of double mirror effect between plate and bottom of cover glass, which moves around behind the image like a holograph.  Viewers are asked to rely on their experience with handling and viewing daguerreotypes live.

For more information or purchase inquiries, please write to thephotopalace@gmail.com

Anton

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”

I’ve always been extremely curious about this historically important and visually stunning method of image-production, but my love for daguerreotypes was really sparked in 2012, when, while being on my first cross country trip aboard The Photo Palace Bus, I had the extreme pleasure and luck of meeting Rob McElroy in Buffalo NY.  You can read about that incredible adventure and see some images HERE and then a followup HERE.  Aside form being simply an amazing human being, Rob is one of the very best in the world when it comes to this form of art and I was truly astounded by his work and the whole process.  The bug got it’s bite and since then I have been dreaming about making my own plates.  Daguerreotype equipment though is extremely expensive – the safety that must be factored into mercury pots and low demand leading to very small number of people producing this stuff both contribute to the cost factor, and that’s not even to mention the plates – pure silver isn’t cheap…  So my desire to become a daguerreotype artist seemed far off and nearly unattainable.
In 2012 though I wasn’t even doing wet plate….  Well, in 2013 I learned to worked with collodion, got acquainted with the community and lo and behold – one of the folks who was living right in San Diego did both collodion and daguerreotypes!  Race Gentry is now a good friend of mine and we hang out as often as his busy life and school schedule lets us.  He has been kind enough to let me use his equipment to start learning and also shared a wealth of knowledge that he accumulated over the years both from experience and by reading historic literature on the subject.  Right now I’m in the final stages of gathering up all my own equipment, but I know that Race and I will be friends regardless – he’s just too much fun to hang out with.

So, with Race’s help I started making becquerel plates last year.   I made some fairly good ones rather quickly as it’s not all that complicated of a technique.

4x5in

35mm

The lack of fine tonality and long exposures (25sec for the two you see above) made me become rather bored rather quickly.  Don’t know why I took so long after that boredom set in to start pursuing success with real mercury daguerreotypes, but I only really dedicated myself to this task a couple of months ago.  During that time there were periods when I made multiple images a day for a week or two straight and then there were times when discouraged I took breaks only to return with more force later.
I’m not going to try to make is sound like obtaining a decent-looking plate is the hardest thing in the world.  I’m sure climbing Mt. Everest to the summit, running 100m under 10sec, truly understanding women or making a mentally challenged squirrel be able to teach calculus are all things that are harder.  However daguerreotypes have their challenges and quirks and overcoming (or at least sidestepping) them have proven to be quite a feat for yours truly.
First there’s buffing – that darn plate must be so perfect and so clean and so much like a mirror that sometimes it seemed that I’ll never get it…  Then there’s fuming – it’s done by visual inspection and there’s only a small window of particular hues of pink that works best and to top that off the proportion of iodine to bromine that is used in achieving that hue reflects on both speed of the plate and contrast of the final image.  Next there’s development – that’s relatively straight forward, one just have to find an optimal combination of mercury temperature and development time that doesn’t go too long and lets mercury globs to accumulate in the shadow areas (like the ones you see in the below image of a box camera in the center – that one’s under-exposed so in vain I tried pushing development, something that you just can’t do with daguerreotypes).  OH, and then, after you might have gotten the best results you have seen in your plates you have to gild that thing and THAT is one conniving and malicious step I tell you!  The most perfect plate can go to being absolute garbage right in front of your eyes literally in a span of a few seconds and there’s not a single thing you can do to stop that once it starts happening…  To top it all off almost every single practicing daguerreotype image maker I have asked seems to have their own unique workflow that works for them – sometimes steps vary only slightly from one person to another and in other instance it made me wonder if they are even working on the same technique….  All advice was taken with stride and a grain of salt.

OK – time for some images.
All 5 of the good (and in the eyes of some that may be a stretch of the word ‘good’) images you see below are copied after gilding.
Here’s a an image I did yesterday – I believe it’s my best mercury plate so far and I was extremely excited when gilding didn’t ruin it completely (some back spots in the sky did show up, but I have a faint hunch about what may have caused that, so let’s see if in the next few sessions I can prevent them from occurring again).

1/4 plate

Now let’s quickly compare the above plate to just a few of the plates that I deemed worthy of copying with my phone camera during the long and windy road of learning the craft.

Progress is evident, no?  Here’s a few more recent images made after last week I for one reason or another had what seemed like a breakthrough.  This was the first one I made that wasn’t awful – as I said above, it’s about a full stop or maybe even two underexposed and I tried correcting that by pushing development time past where it should have ended, but in real life now it actually looks not too bad thanks to the amazing Carillo Method of brightening gilded images – this method was discovered very recently by Daniel Carrillo of Portland OR and, if it works right, it does wonders to dull images.  Let me tell you though it doesn’t exactly work perfect every time, at least it hasn’t for me…

4x5in

Here’s is the first portrait I was truly happy with – even the gilding spared it from irregularities.  To top it off this is the first daguerreotype plate that I sold, so thank you very much Robert Matheson!

1/6 plate

Oh, and of course here’s Fred – the wonderfully patient man of kind temper who resides across the stairs form my darkroom.  In the compilation of failed images above you see how many times he posed  for me and not once was he reluctant to do so.  He is a true gentleman and a scholar. It is unfortunate that during gilding the stain on bottom right decided to appear, but otherwise I believe it’s a solid plate in all respects.

1/6 plate

And here’s a still life composition – my little homage to the old-times, the photographers who came before me, the tools they used and the people who passed in front of their lenses.

1/4 plate

Sentiments for the new year from Takashi Arai

From yesterday’s Smithsonian Blog, this example of dedication to the daguerreian arts:

“After 20 minutes of rest Blondin began the journey to the other side, this time with a Daguerreotype camera strapped to his back. He advanced 200 feet, affixed his balancing pole to the cable, untied his load, adjusted it in front of him and snapped a likeness of the crowd along the American side. Then he hoisted the camera back into place and continued on his way. The entire walk from bank to bank to bank took 23 minutes, and Blondin immediately announced an encore performance to take place on the Fourth of July”.

Just in from Eric Mertens, this little safety reminder concerning an industrial bromine spill in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The Gizmodo article accompanying the video makes the assertion that the cloud you see is the result of only 10 gallons being released. Regardless of the truth of that, let’s all be careful out there.

Original Gizmodo article

5 more submissions for the juried exhibit.