Here is my latest effort, a portrait of my wife Sarah.

Sarah - Plate 1011

This was taken with I2 fuming 23 Sec to golden yellow, 10 Sec exposure @ f1.7 EV 14.5 @ ISO 100, Becquerel development for two hours. Overall I like it, the only defect is that the highlights on the cheekbones are slightly blown.

This plate as with the two previous posts was taken on silvered glass. I will be posting an article on my methods fairly soon on CDags.org.

Stag_Plate-1012

Here is the next installment of the images I worked on over the holiday break. Exposure continues to be a challenge. By going to the gallery you can compare this image to one I took earlier. The first image is rather badly overexposed, the second one (above)  I was happy with.

Spent my time on the holiday break finishing a conversion of my equipment to take 35 mm plates. I decided that smaller is better for now – it let’s me work using much less expensive plates, and use a better lens than I have in my large format camera. I made enough keepers to justify getting a scanner which I set up tonight. Only time to scan one, but I will post more soon.

Nutcrackers (Plate 1006)

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”.

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.