Folllowing on from our recent post about the oldest living daguerreian here is an image from possibly the youngest. 8 year old Grania operated the camera and lenscap entirely by herself and timed the exposure (with a little help from Dad with a lightmeter)…

Welcome to the new version of the community website for contemporary daguerreotypes. The expanded editorial team has created what we hope you will think is a great new look for the site and has chosen a simple, but evocative new name. We envisage the addition of a wiki here as a powerful new information tool to enhance the blog and the forum.

A new banner with images that automatically refresh shows enticing portions of images by daguerreians who have galleries on the site. When you click on an image it will take you straight to the gallery of the artist who created it.

The forum section has new software but all the old posts are there as are the ones in the blog. We hope you will like the clean, simple structure and the speed boost the new forum software provides.

The back-end integration of blog and forum isn’t quite complete yet, your logins are the same for both but in the interim you will have to re-enter them from blog to forum and vice versa. Eventually a single logon will access everything.

Regards

the editorial team:

Alan Bekhuis
Jon Lewis
Andy Stockton

For those of you looking for a traditional ambience to your studio, a new listing on ebay just might be the ticket… or not, an unusual item but probably not destined for the Resources page.

We all know one of the most difficult things about making daguerreotypes, especially for beginners, is the lack of equipment. As such, Alan and I thought it important to have a place to buy, sell, and trade daguerreian equipment and supplies. I am proud to announce the Daguerreian Marketplace as the fourth section of the forum. It is only viewable by members of the forum so log in or sign up.

Enjoy!
Jon Lewis

Keeping the galleries section international are the Daguerreotypes of Åke Hultman. Åke comes from Sweden and uses both the cold mercury and Becquerel processes.

One of the reasons in setting up this site was to provide a forum for contemporary daguerreotypists to discuss the process. As is often the case with good ideas, others come to them at the same time. Jon Lewis from Santa Fe recently set up www.dagforum.com , so now we are to pool our efforts to establish an active online Daguerreian community. The links on this site for the Forum now redirect to Jon’s forum site. Contemporarydaguerreotypes.info will concentrate on providing resources for the forums – artists work, images of related equipment , links etc.

Such endeavors take much time and effort so my initial shock at a similar forum has given way to relief that there is someone else also at the helm. Charlie Schreiners site , newdags.com, broke the ground that we hope to build on with software that automates the organizing of data posted, making it easy to add new daguerreotypists and their work to the websites. I look forward to working with Jon who also has web design experience.

I hope this website to showcase all that is going on in Contemporary Daguerreotypy and with the Forums section, contribute to the genre. Please feel free to contribute images and information, I would like to have a individual page for each modern Daguerreotypist, showing your images and links to any personal websites you have. Also feel free to say what you’d like to see on the website, I will do my best to accommodate everyone. Regards, Alan Bekhuis