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CasedImageKeymaster
Does the mercury pot you are using have a double dark slide? – when you slide it back and forth it may be making the pot bounce a bit. This causes the mercury to move/slop around in the pot. Mercury behaves very oddly as a liquid, small globules bounce around and up from the bottom of the pot. I think your white spots are the mercury hitting the plate. As Photolytic recently noted , keep the pot walls free of mercury – inspect it regularly and use a pit of paper to push globules back down to the bottom of the pot. Beware of mercury physically and atmospherically, it is both the enemy and the calvary.
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CasedImageKeymasterHoping not to sound like a wet blanket but it may be the better question to ask is why rather than how. Plates at that size show so much reflection that from any angle it is difficult to see the whole image. Daguerreotypes are best viewed hand held and so something approaching a size that will fit in your hand/s makes this optimal. The general rule with making daguerreotypes is that it gets more difficult as you increase in plate size. I would recommend that once you can make good whole plates then progress to larger sizes.
Adam Fuss makes plates of 11 x 17″ size from memory, perhaps 20 x 24″, I have visited his studio and he has a team of people to assist him in his endeavors.
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CasedImageKeymasterThat link should be http://www.cdags.org/wp-content/uploads/PhotCanV29-4Burder-2%20fi%5B1%5D.pdf , its in the “general writing” section of the resources page under “Making Daguerreotypes – My First 12 Months”. if I remember correctly David used resublimed Iodine rather than crystalline, the later off gases at a greater rate.
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CasedImageKeymasterHi Andy, no i think the mount is black card with a bronze design printed on it
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CasedImageKeymasterI’ve seen this before somewhere, on ebay france is what looks to be a becquerel dag from the 1890’s or around ww1, or perhaps another process with similar looks:
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CasedImageKeymasterThis plate type is know by a few names – sheffield, clad, bi-metal, cold rolled. It was the main form of silver plating before electroplating was invented. A simple explanation of the process would be a sheet of silver is placed on a copper ingot historically with some borax and is rolled under pressure in a cold rolling mill. This is done several times with the metal being annealed in a annealing oven between each pass through the cold rolling mill to prevent it cracking. The silver is contact bonded to the copper rather than being melted on. Its not always easy to tell if a vintage plate was clad or electroplated (both existed in the daguerreian era) as clad plates were also galvanized prior to use – a fine layer of extra silver was made by placing the plate in a silver chloride solution, the combination of the silver and copper creates a weak electrical current which causes silver deposition in the solution on the silver side and etches the copper side of the plate. The end result is that there is a silver layer on the back of the plate as with fully electroplated plates
The hallmark “40” tells of the thickness of the layer of silver in this plate – the ratio of silver to copper is 1:40, plates 1:20 were also used and provided more silver for plates in rebuffing/reusing before the copper layer shows through.
Vintage plates like this that have been through the wars of handling often are warped/not flat. This makes it difficult to reuse them as you will find you get uneven buffing results. Personally I don’t reuse vintage plates regardless of condition because it creates the demand for vintage images to be buffed away which is a great loss.
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CasedImageKeymasterHere is cropped view showing the plate holder and its recess that allows the plate holder to drop down into place over the glass dish.
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CasedImageKeymasterJohn, I don’t see how this design doesn’t provide total confinement of chemicals as with a strike through design.
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CasedImageKeymasterI really don’t see how the “operations” thing is such a issue, you put the plate in, you expose it to the halogens. Each “operation” takes a second, yes its an extra second or two but so what. The benefits are its compact nature whilst maintaining a good seal. Agreed adding stops would be prudent but its a small tweak to be made.
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CasedImageKeymasterI guess a tweak to the design if there is no stop is to have the coverglass to be oversized to the dish enough to have stops at the corners, that would pass on the outside of the dish.
I don’t see the extra manipulations as a serious downside. If you had one strikethrough fuming box and and one of this design then yes it might get confusing but having two the same and you would fall into the rhythm of it. I’ve had two sets of the european style and the only thing that bothered me was a less than optimum seal. I think this is a good design and as a first model out of the workshop I think it bodes very well for genre which has too few suppliers of quality equipment.
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CasedImageKeymasterBrilliant original design! I too like the offset finger cutouts, also the breadboarding of the cover plate (and coincidentally harks to the wooden construction of 19th dag and ambro cases). Well done!
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CasedImageKeymasterI seem to remember that Mike Robinson’s fuming boxes use springs of some metal that does not corrode with iodine or bromine.
The two sets of fuming boxes I’ve owned that relied on the glass dish being pushed up against the minimal length cover glass slide leaked fumes. The tightening screw on the strikethrough does seem to do a much better job and the double length cover gives better ease of operation.
Fuming boxes of non corroding materials sound great, I don’t think when it comes to chemical storage, aesthetics of traditional boxes are a big concern.
In my iodine fuming box I distribute the crystals in layers of cotton wool so they don’t slide around in the dish and become concentrated in one area, also it helps distribute the fumes evenly to the plate.
Indeed having more makers of dag. equipment would great, its whats needed to have more people getting into practicing the art and that will elevate and expand what is a very small genre – a win win situation.
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CasedImageKeymasterBit late on posting this one – a quarter plate by Mike Robinson sold on ebay, hand tinted and in one of his resin reproduction union cases –
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CasedImageKeymasterHi Michael – I have emailed you his email address, can do the same for anyone else who wants it, just drop us a line at
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CasedImageKeymasterRe Sandie Barrie – back in about 1993 he came to NZ and gave a daguerreotype demonstration at a NZ photographic collectors meeting in the NZ center for photography. Back then I had no idea what daguerreotypes were (though it is nice to now think that my first encounter was a contemporary plate). I remember him explaining the process which seemed to my 35mm home darkroom sensibilities to be a mixture of alchemy and gobbledygook, to the 30 something crowd of middle aged and elderly photo boffins. I can’t remember the sensitization and exposure bit but I do remember him removing the plate from the mercury pot to show us the developed image. At the time I though nothing much of the rather bare looking pot (no double dark slide or presence of a fume hood) but thinking back now to the mercury fuming away in front of us…. well yes.
This also reminds me of a certain daguerreian who a few decades ago was developing his plates on the kitchen stove, using a lensless inverted kodak bellows camera to funnel the fumes towards the plate… and himself.
I mention these horror stories in relation to the subsequent mercury poisoning to reinforce the lesson being told here that mercury is not to be toyed with.
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CasedImageKeymasterTwo new images from Marc Kereun up on ebay France:
Venus de Milo et Bouddha
Venus de Milo
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CasedImageKeymasterwhat a great and succinct post John, its not often this gets discussed, many thanks
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CasedImageKeymasterBlack spots post development in my experience are from dust settling on the plate just prior to sensitization with the iodine, as it prevents the iodine from reacting with the silver. Being paranoid about about using a hand blower on the plate before placing it in the iodine box solved it for me, including every time I took the plate out to check the color.
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CasedImageKeymasterA Claudet trick for stereo was to focus one half of the stereo in the foreground and the other in the background to exacerbate the stereo effect, which does work very well. The main thing I would think is you have two identical lens or use the same one twice and have the correct inter ocular separation.
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CasedImageKeymasterI have a page for ivan’s cameras in the tech galleries – http://www.cdags.org/?page_id=610
the stereo attachment with 6th plate camera in action can be seen at the bottom of the page.
Also there are a few variations on this design – can be seen in vintage examples at
http://www.cdags.org/?page_id=285
Ivan does amazing work – fine dovetailing and design. He does machining of brass to make flanges for lenses and other metalwork. His cameras sometimes come up at the Christies camera auctions in London with the vintage material. I heard of camera collectors getting him to make sliding box cameras without the hole for the lens as apparently this was how they were bought in the 19th century – you then choose a lens and had it fitted.
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CasedImageKeymasterSo I’m about to buy more gold chloride and my chemical company is offering two types of gold chloride –
“two different compounds.The second one is gold monochloride (aurous) which is less stable so it is likely you would use the gold trichloride (auric), This is definitely more common.
“
these are product details (with the NZ dollar/peso):
Item: ACR318645000 EA Qty: 2 $132.35 $264.70
Gold (III) chloride 99% 500mg
Item: ACR388330010 EA Qty: 1 $364.75 $364.75
Gold(I) chloride 99+% 1 gram
So my question is will the difference matter?
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CasedImageKeymasterWell this plate wasn’t a lot better than the last but enough to gild and seal, my new years resolution will be to keep shooting regularly so I don’t get so rusty..
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CasedImageKeymasterAfter at least a month of finding it impossible to do any image capture, I had a go with a ninth plate today, woefully overexposed view of Mother and cat, shall try again tomorrow with the sweltering summer sun we have here in NZ at the moment..
clad, galvanised for 3mins, 33 sec iodine, 4 sec bromine, 15 secs 2nd Iodine, 3 sec exp @ f3.5, 8 mins at 70c, ungilded
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CasedImageKeymasterHi Festus, do you have access to a flatbed scanner or can yo take a digtial image of the plate? Posting that here will help with getting good advice as to what’s going wrong
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CasedImageKeymasterAt the same scene again today as I wanted to better aspects of the plate from yesterday and Daguerre be praised, it happened. finally I am getting whites as white as in my best becquerel plates. This plate didn’t have the sheen/low level haze that the one did yesterday, I am always quite unsure how long to galvanise for and how much buffing to do post galvanising, but I seem to be getting there.
clad plate, galvanised 3 minutes, 40 secs iodine, 4 secs bromine, 10 secs 2nd iodine, F3.5 @ 5 secs, 8mins @ 70C, gilded.
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