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Well I was out there again today with my trusty UV meter, which got up to level 6 today.., but that aside I think I have a keeper from the 4 goes I have had on this scene. Another quarter plate it was galvanised for 3.5 minutes, Iodine for 1 min, Bromine 5 secs, back over the Iodine for 10 seconds. Exposure was 3 seconds at F3.5, development for 16 mins at around 52 degrees C ( I use a alcohol lamp and when I’m not paying attention it ranges a bit) and gilded till bubbles rise through the solution.

There’s a range of issues that I still need to improve on but this plate makes me feel that I’ve finally arrived at where I wanted to be when I started aspiring towards the process and that was 10.5 years ago and its been 6 years since I made my first image on my own…

Also attached here is the scene, more images and a movie over at CasedImage.com/about

 

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Thanks Irv, I wonder what speed a pinhole daguerreotype would be like. Has anyone ever tried them?

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good stuff Corey , keep it up – I sense a new gallery page coming on..

I used to get blue bdags as well, I must of sorted out the issue as my latter bdags didn’t have it. Off the top of my head I would say it need more development, the rubylith can make it difficult to tell what’s going on there.

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Hi John, it probably measures incident light, it really only works when you point it straight at the sun and tells you of a overall level of UV, most reflected light scenes give a zero reading.

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When living in the far south of NZ I have seen this UV meter get up to level 9 , the 3 digit level secondary reading on it was over 800, on the meter it is characterised as “extreme”. Apparently NZ has some of the highest rates of UV and also the highest level of skin cancer per capita. This is supposed to be due to our proximity to the hole on the ozone over Antarctica. Last year we were in Ireland for 6 months in “summer” (it rained at some stage of every day for 6 months..) and I never saw the light meter climb above level 4.

There is a pic of the meter in the tech galleries ( http://www.cdags.org/?page_id=172 ) which has displayed the same reading as the one I got and posted this morning!

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Morning sun here, level 3 on the meter (moderate range), 075 mW/m2

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Well there you go another myth debunked – 0 reading through the lens and glass.

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Andy, the UV meter is the one that’s in the tech gallery page for light meters, it cost only $20.

Jon, I did have both the cooler bag and freezer pack in sip lock bags and separated in the cool bag by some packing in the cooler bag, but no desicator. I must say I’d rather than freeze/cool plates I’d prefer to work out a mobile darkroom.

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I have a UV meter, it measures 9 levels and also a 3 digit level reading. It measured in the upper portion of level three, the exposure was three seconds, i think 5 would have done it. The other plate was 3 secs exposure to but that was bright sunlight and it had a lesser development time (12 mins @ 50 degC, with the underexposed one I took it to 14.5 mins). It occurred to me what the spots were on the other plate – I put in a cooler pack to see if it would guard against latent image fading on the car trip home and there was some condensation on the plate. With the most recent plate I better assisted the process by driving faster!

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well this scene is becoming a bit of a saga for me, I polished a new plate today and went back to it. It was mostly overcast today and I ended up under exposing it, which I think was the lack of UV as my light meter was indicating all would be fine. I lengthened the development for this one almost to frosting but in the end it is was what it is. I guess its not so bad but the spotty one recently posted has much more visual impact in the hand, though thats a little to do with composition.

 

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Well not quite sure what happened here, i think the measles are from trying to remove a unused galvanising layer that I thought was too thin and re-did it with a thicker one. The spots were there before it went into the fix. I think the sensitisation was a little uneven, as well as too much bromine. It actually looks really nice in the hand so I had to resist the urge to gild it. Back to the buffing paddles with this one..

 

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That’s an interesting definition of lens glass. Kingslake mentions that the early lens were not achromatic and had that disparity between visual and chemical focus. Claudet solved it by using a stepped wheel (focimeter) in the scene of test plates that when processed showed the adjustment needed. As Kingslake mentions, the advent of achromatic lens that used both crown and flint glass corrected the problem and apparently these early lenses were well suited to orthochromatic photo processes like the Daguerreotype.

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Today’s effort, many faults, a tide mark from drying the plate after galvanising, some stains in gilding and of course the spots etc, but this week has been a succession of dreary dull grey days here, so I decided to kept it . A clad plate galvanised for 3 mins, 40 secs of Iodine, 4 of Bromine, a 13 sec exposure, mercurial development at 50 degrees C for 12 minutes and gilded till I got bored of it. I put it in a hand painted passe partout that I made 7 years ago, which like the plate isn’t totally up to scratch but together they are quite bearable on the eye. The subject is a cherry blossom in our garden which is heralding the coming summer here in NZ that I am eagerly awaiting.

 

 

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Hi Corey, I used to look after a photographic negative collection at a museum which included 20,000 negs that were taken to document Howard Carter’s excavation and opening of Tutankhamun tomb. So the story goes that being short on electric light in some instances, they brought light down into the tombs by a series of mirrors to take the shots. Nice story if true but you might still have a hard time of it with a dag exposure.

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In regards to the show of hands and with respect Jon – each to their own. Photography has always been driven by the dollar and ideological decree’s on content for a artist community (however worthy) tend not mesh with that. Its such a demanding process in terms of resources that it has to pay its way and so what the client wants, the client gets. Ageing of dags for commercial gain, occurs to within the membership of the Daguerreian society too. I have been told by dag dealers that after to vigourously chemically cleaning a plate they have let it sit, unsealed but with the mat and cover glass sitting on it, in a airtight container with hard boiled eggs. This to add some plausible sulphiding around the mat edge and to cap it all off then resealing it using strips of vintage 1850’s newspaper… the evil that men do..

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When I sat for a triptych portrait for Jerry Spagnoli, the lighting set up blew me away… almost literally! He had a huge lighting set up, many high voltage devices coupled together that probably made the lights dim in the rest of the building on west 25th street. With all this lighting the exposure was a fraction of a second (dags with shutters, who’d thought!) and it was a that point that two things shocked me – the flash of the lights felt like someone blowing a puff of air on my skin and the smell of burning hair (mine). So maybe a few pre cancerous cells accrued, it was all for a good cause though – Art and making the cover of Jerry’s Steidl book!

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Talas, a bookbinding and conservation supplier in NYC stocks an interesting product that may relate to Mike’s use of Silca gel:

http://apps.webcreate.com/ecom/catalog/product_specific.cfm?ProductID=27849

apparently that talas link doesn’t work, here’s one to a local supplier here

http://www.conservationsupplies.co.nz/lines/548.html

but you can search for it in the talas website under silca gel

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I guess it is harder to see if you looking directly on the plate, I have a piece of white card taped to the wall of the fumehood and I hold the plate next to that. I use a combination of light directly from the lamp and that reflected by the card. I use a small portable safelight that has a clear 15 watt bulb in it. For the white light I take off the red plastic cover that gives the red safelight. So with the the card I am looking at the white reflection of the card if that makes sense, it may not as this hard to type – earleir today while using the power drill to take the back of on of my buffling paddles I managed drill the phillips head bit through the fingernail of my forefinger. And I’ve been worrying about the handling the 250 ml of bromine I just got! oi vey….

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Few problems with this one, too much bromine, dust getting in the way of the halogens , slightly overexposed and developed but the thicker galvanising layer on this one seems to be helping the image tone. Thanks to the wife for pulling the lens cap..

 

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For the oval fixing tank – just keep an eye out in shops like crate and barrel, bed bath and beyond etc – they are sold as vases and oval ones seem to be fashionable so eventually you’ll find one that works

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The plates would have been for Niepce’s process, the physautotype, not for the daguerreotype. It was very different from the Daguerreotype , he used iodine to blacken exposed portions of silver on a plate, post exposure and partial development. Daguerre’s approach was different of course, using Iodine as a sensitising agent, his discovery and use of latent image development and of course the stumbling block that most would-be inventors of photography struggled with, he halted the action of the light sensitive silver salts post development by fixing the plate in a saturated salt solution. His initial version of the process did have very long exposures but they were much better the physautotype’s which were several hours. The plates mentioned in the letter above probably bore photomechanical images rather than images from nature. Niepce like Talbot was more concerned with a process that would allow for the mass reproduction of images. Daguerre’s aspiration was less mundane and sort the perfection he could see in a mirror.

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Its winter here in NZ, occasionally the sun beckons though and here’s today’s response to it. I have changed my development time and temperature which seems to be a step in the right direction as I have lost the blue cast I was getting in mid tones and there is more detail in the image. This is a third plate (3.75 x 4.25) mercurial, gilded and galvanised clad plate.

 

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Yes there is a card spacer to keep the plate surface of the the cover glass, these were simple 1 ply card in depth or more elaborate and up to a 1/4 inch in depth and cover with gold painted paper (for a look at these see the passe partout gallery in the technology galleries section).

The main trick with passe partout (and its not easy) is being able to paint a thin line consistently (so aesthetically this enhances the framing effect, not detracting with an inconsistent one) and in having a good edge to the line/mat window edge. Not to blow my own horn but Grant Romer of the Eastman House and photo conservation fame, has said that CasedImage.com’s are the best, if not the only ones in modern times to emulate the nineteenth century examples.

Bar a couple of trade secrets I am happy to give advice about making passe partout ( and dag enclosures in general) and would urge you to have a go and ask more questions here. observing fine dag enclosures and making them are two different things and much of the learning is in the making. As far as I know there is no historical record of methods used, unlike as with cases in E Anthony’s catalogue of 1854.

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Just my opinion but the fine detail of a daguerreotype is not enhanced at all by having the rough or fibrous edge of mat board/paper sitting on the image. The burnished edge of a metal mat or the razor sharp line of a finely painted passe partout, gives a much more pleasing aesthetic in line with the physical quality of a daguerreotype. This is presumably why early on in the nineteenth century era the initial paper mats disappeared from the scene and reverse painted passe partout became the popular choice.

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Latest from Rob McElroy on ebay;

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=310149538119

 

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