The Daguerreotypist

This weekend was my 55th birthday, and I decided to pull out all the stops and finally make my first daguerreotypes. For the edification of future students of the process I will also confess that my first two tries were total failures. I carefully prepared a plate, set up a lovely still life of a Japanese sword and a teacup, and managed to take this excellent specimen:

My First Daguerreotype

My second daguerreotype looked remarkably like the first. Sigh. I guess I have spent far too many years using cameras that take the work out of determining exposure. I wasn’t even close. I almost gave up, but then I got really annoyed. I decided to refume the second plate and then expose the hell out of it. I didn’t even bother to re-set my still life, I just pointed the camera at a random object and let the sun do it’s thing for a very long time. Here is the result, I call it “Sea Creatures” :)

My Third Daguerreotype

It is seriously over-exposed, but it was a definite thrill seeing any image at all appear. It is too late in the day for more technical details, but I will post the lab notes tomorrow. In the meantime it is nice to know that I am now “A daguerreotypist” even if not yet “The”.

Tags: Daguerreotype Process by andy
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Two more furlough days down the tubes. I did succeed in devoting them to daguerreotypes, but didn’t make the progress I had hoped (what’s new?) :)

Today I had actually decided to take my first ever Becquerel D-Type but when I pulled out my small collection of plates, none of them really seemed to have an adequate level of polish. Call me Mr. Fussy, but I just don’t see the point of making a D-Type that you know from the get-go won’t be of the highest possible quality.

Sooooooo….. back to the tub of polishing supplies. I had a Mike Robinson clad plate that I had taken to a pretty high degree of polish in my last D-Type marathon, but it had what I can only refer to as “haze”. I hit it with the following:

A) 5 Min NuShine II S using the ROS with a foam pad and one of my new micro-fiber pad covers.
B) 5 Min 0.3 Micron Alumina Slurry (ROS & Etc)
C) 5 Min Dry red rouge
D) 5 Min Lampblack

Net result was a few places that seemed less hazy,  but overall not much improvement. I thought about starting over, but I seem to have trouble in the coarser end of the polishing compound spectrum. I have a tendency to chew through the silver clad layer before I know it.

I was getting annoyed, and when I get annoyed I usually get stubborn.

I knew that even very fine grit will polish metal if you give it long enough. I decided to just hit the plate with dry rouge for as long as it took to get to a perfect polish.

It takes about three hours and fifteen minutes.

Polished Plate - The hard way

The big milestone is that I was satisfied for the first time ever with my level of polish. I also learned a few things. I discovered that clad plates can have little pinhole defects in them. I had read about that, but now know what it looks like. I also learned a lot about keeping my polishing area free of contaminants – to prevent those maddening “squiggles” that I was getting from time-to-time.

I also know that I can make a perfect looking plate (I had been beginning to wonder). It isn’t a viable polishing method for the long term. I probably had more than an hour in the plate from the first effort bringing my time investment to 4 or 5 hours for one sixth plate. I hope I get to where I can be more efficient than that. I knew D-Types weren’t Polaroids, but good grief!

Any way, more experiments ahead. Today didn’t turn out to be D-Day (the sun went away behind a wall of fog) but I am getting closer. I guess I will have to admit that I am pretty stubborn. I have at least three different polishing “instruction sets” but I continue to be convinced that I can invent a better one on my own.

Speaking of stubborn, yesterday I continued my experiments with making mirrored glass as a potential daguerreotype substrate. In spite of published accounts of failures, I still want to see if I can make it work. The twin sirens of “less polishing” and “cheaper plates” continues to draw me on.

If you would like to read/see more, go to to my lab notes or the image gallery.

Hopefully stubbornness will turn out to be a good quality in a daguerreotypist.

Tags: Daguerreotype Process by andy
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Not much to say about today that isn’t already in the Lab Notes. I didn’t quite make my eight hour committment. Oh well, “stuff” happens. In addition it was very overcast today, so I’m not sure how well a Becquerel daguerreotype would have developed. Nevertheless progess was made – and never mind perfection.

Tags: Daguerreotype Process by andy
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Thanks to the meltdown of the California state budget this last year, Governor Schwartzenegger has given all California State University workers (including me) a gift of 24 days off without pay in the next eleven months. Rather than moping around about the loss of income, I have decided to devote each of my “extra” days off to attaining my ongoing goal of becoming a daguerreotypist.

Any of you who have followed my writing know that I have been conducting a rather slow motion quest – due mostly to lack of adequate free time. Excruciatingly slow. This temporary change in my schedule should give me the boost I need to at least make it to my first daguerreotype and hopefully beyond.

Today was the first day off, and I devoted it entirely to moving forward with my art. As part of my re-energized commitment, I have also decided to post my lab notes on these days as well. You can find those at the link below.

Lab Notes

I’m heading over to CDags.org now to see if the experienced artists there will be willing to advise me on a problem I ran into today when I practiced fuming a plate for the second time.

Happy daguerreotyping!

Tags: Daguerreotype Process by andy
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Well, in the course of making a backup of TheDaguerreotypist this morning I wiped out some crucial WordPress files and brought down the whole site. Thank goodness for ISP’s that make periodic backups without being asked! After the restore I had everything except the most recent post about making a pair of buffing paddles. The pictures of the process are here.

The goal was to make a simple paddle that could be easily replicated in larger sizes, and had a system for holding on the covering cloth in a way that kept tension on the covering and also allowed the cover to be easily changed. The base material is a 1/2″ softwood board with a layer of felt glued to it. It is covered with Ultrasuede. The Ultrasuede has sewn in pockets to hold some pieces of 1/8″ steel rod that in turn are the anchors for a set of four steel springs. I also tried a string and spring version and a rubber band version, neither one of which worked very well.

The dimensions are not critical, you only need to make sure there is enough distance between the two steel rods so that the springs are under some tension. The free ends just tuck under the springs. The whole shebang just sits on the workbench and a plate held with a suction tool is rubbed back and forth along the top. It doesn’t move around much when polishing sixth plates. It might need some kind of hold-down in bigger sizes.

We will see how well it holds up in use. Now off to make a new ground glass for my camera to replace the one that fell out on my foot.  This was not my best day ever.

Tags: Daguerreotype Process by andy
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