Was doing some research on Rubylith and added a very short article about it to the CDags Wiki. I need to find more people to help add articles to the wiki, it is still pretty threadbare…
Daguerreotype Diary, Daguerreotype Diary 2011 | andy | December 30, 2011 | 
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Had a nice inquiry e-mail about the sliding fume box from Javier Camara in Japan. It is always good to hear from fellow daguerreian explorers. I advised him that it was still a work in progress ( the word progress being used in a rather optimistic manner). I still haven’t charged up the bromine side of the box yet…
Daguerreotype Diary, Daguerreotype Diary 2011 | andy | December 28, 2011 | Comments Off
Just finished watching the Jerry Spagnoli ICP video that is posted on CDags.org. Very interesting comments about the future of Photography and his ideas about the purpose and meaning of exploring early processes. I also gleaned the following technical comments Jerry made when discussing his portrait work:
Portrait Info
f3.1 – f3.5 lens
12″ to 16″ Focal length lens
30,000 Watt Seconds – Elinchrome Classics – No modifiers
Allows him to use “one pop of the strobe”
Dag ISO according to Jerry is 0.03
Daguerreotype Diary, Daguerreotype Diary 2011 | andy | December 27, 2011 | Comments Off
Ran first mercury fume safety tests since rebuilding the battery pack for the Jerome 411 Mercury vapor analyzer. Preliminary results indicate that Castle Daguerre is safe, but that double containing the mercury I have stored in a secondary containment jar is prudent. Glass bottles with “HDPE body/Teflon seal” type caps still had measurable fumes in the containment jar. Some small plastic bottles had nearly 20x the OSHA Permissible Exposure Limit inside the containment jar. The (outdoor) storage area was free of measurable fumes however.
Daguerreotype Diary, Daguerreotype Diary 2011 | andy | December 26, 2011 | Comments Off
Set up Batch Plug-in for GIMP so I can re-size pics for the web as a group.
Daguerreotype Diary, Daguerreotype Diary 2011 | andy | | Comments Off
Courtesy Lib. of Congress
Today is (more or less) the day that in 1839 saw the public announcement of the daguerreotype process. Thank you Louis and Joseph!
Having some time off from work. Have created what (I hope!) are the final cutting templates for the stainless steel dag plate project. Also picked up an odd Packard type shutter on e-Bay that I may try to replicate in acrylic. Also spending some time on finalizing the sixth plate camera and experimenting with creating [...]
Two straight days of prepping plans for laser cutting. Steel plate cutting templates, lens mounts and film holder mounts for the B&J 8×10 and some experimental 35mm plate holders made out of 1/32 ABS. Not quite done, but should be good to go when Pagoda Arts reopens after vacation time. A great leap forward.
Did a dry run today of the new plate cutting templates at Tech Shop. Ran into some problems with the first cut and had to back off on the production run. Need to make some template adjustments. The good news is that the cutting is three times as precise as it needs to be. Finished [...]
Have been slowly moving forward with my experiment to create stainless steel based plates. Today I plan to finalize the cutting templates so I can cut up the 1′x2′ piece I had plated. The plan is to use 1/16″ acrylic laser-cut templates to guide the cutting on the 40″ hydraulic shear at TechShop. The real [...]
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