Making glass daguerreotypes

[Andy Stockton]

I have posted an article on the resources page about my recent experience making glass daguerreotypes. Enjoy.

 

[phuphuphnik]

Andy, this is fantastic! I have used vapor deposition for silvering glass, and many of my first attempts were on glass. This method is quite simple and requires no vacuum chamber like the deposition I did. One thing to consider is the thickness of the silver. I have used telescopes with mirrors made like this that are quite old, and there were no signs of flaking off. We are removing some of the silver and transforming quite a bit of it chemically making dags. Perhaps this leads to too thin a layer to hold to the glass? I’ll save my pennies and get a coating kit. The more people experimenting with this the better.

cheers,

chriso

[Andy Stockton]

Thanks, it was a great deal of fun to do. I hope you will report on your experiments. There are numerous questions still to answer and sharing our attempts will help.

 

As far as silver thickness in concerned Mike King from Angel Gilding estimates the dual layer method of chemical deposition to produce a maximum thickness of about 100 nm. Based on Irv Pobboravsky’s work on the thickness of the iodide layer required for daguerreotypes, that would seem to be enough.

 

I am very interested in the results others have in producing larger plates and comparing them to more traditionally made plates. The writeup is based on only a few very small samples (10 total) and I have no significant body of traditional work to compare with the glass versions. I like the look of what I did produce, but will be interested in hearing others make comparisons who have more experience than I do (that is to say almost everyone). 🙂

 

[jgmotamedi]

Thanks for doing this Andy. I think there is quite a bit of promise in glass-plated daguerreotypes, and I hope to get back to it again. I have attached a larger version of my peeling plate.

 

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[Andy Stockton]

You are welcome, I hope the paper triggers a number of interesting experiments. And thanks for posting the image. As you know I ran across it early in my investigation of glass daguerreotypes. Once I got over my disappointment at not having invented the medium 🙂  it was one of the forces that inspired me to keep going. I find it quite hauntingly beautiful.

 

[RonF]

Many thanks, Andy, and one question:

I just want to repeat my earlier comment that it is so nice that daguerreotypists are so willing to spend the time to share their methods with others!

I would like to try this, but after reading on this forum that brass may be easier to plate than copper, I finally picked up some brass; so I am not quite ready to switch gears again yet.

I do have one question about something you wrote in the document “Glass daguerreotypes… are more fragile than metal substrate images, they need mechanical protection as well.”

Are you referring to the possibility of the glass breaking, the silver lifting, or both?

(I haven’t read the whole doc yet, so my apologies if I am asking you to repeat yourself)

[Andy Stockton]

Hi Ron-

That statement just refers to the possibility of glass breakage.

When I first started I was very concerned that the silver would eventually peel off the glass because I saw how fragile the bond was during wet processing. Various conversations I have had now lead me to believe that if you get the silver layer successfully through the wet processing steps intact, there is no reason it won’t last a very long time. This assumes of course that you adequately seal the daguerreotype in the current manner for protecting all silver metal based images.

Good luck on your working with brass. Be sure to write up some of the things that you learn and post them to CDags. It benefits us all.

Andy

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