Daguerreotyping
So you use a metal plate (copper or brass) that you can get already polished and then you have to polish it a lot more because a polished plate is not polished enough and then you have to put silver on it, or get someone else to. We were provided with prepared plates (teacher dude did it for us), but then we had to polish the silver-covered plates. You polish it on a bench grinder that is affixed with jewelry polishing tapered spindles, after you heat it up with a torch.
The plate needs to look sharp, so that if you look at your face and focus on something (say your eye), it should be quite clear. There is a lot of polishing involved, and the method of polishing depends on the final orientation, so it has to be rather deliberate. There are two strengths of polishing. You start with the more abrasive type in which you use rouge (also jewelery polishing stuff), and you start at your opposite orientation and flip it 180 degrees 3 types (four polishing instances, starting from the top of your plate) for each orientation, and you flip it 90 degrees three times, so you go over it 16 times, top to bottom. Then you do it only in your final orientation on the finer spindle.
This is not enough polishing! You need some nice silk velvet to now hand polish that thing. You are going to do it in the orientation of your final image (because there will always be some amount of lines, and since light comes from above nowadays [as opposed to from a window back-in-the-day], it will detract from the detection of said lines).
Notice that I am wearing gloves because your fingers touching the plate will cause you to have to go back to the grinder (which was four flights up where we were). I am really dirty from polishing plates and have lines on my face from wearing goggles.
You next expose your plate to the iodine. This is best done in a little iodine-holding box in a darkroom, after heating your plate up some with a blow dryer. The plate will go through color cycles (it can be exposed to safelight), and a good amount of contrast is in the magenta range of the first cycle.
A plate holder back of some sort is necessary for you to put the plate in and stick it into your camera.
This is basically the scene I took for my cityscape dag.
Here is Yulia posing.
The thing behind her neck is a brace sort of thing that they used to use so that you know where your head is (it doesn't hold it or anything) and you don't move it for long exposures. I don't really entirely get why the poses are several minutes long, as back in the day they were in the seconds range. The mercury process makes it faster, but there are some people working now that have faster exposure times using the same method. A lot of this stuff is guessing.
We had really bright lights on her too.
To develop using the Bacquerel method (versus using mercury and bromine), you only have to put an amberlith printing screen on the plate. The red light reacts with the exposed silver iodide and enlarges the silver crystals, which make up the image. Then you put them under bright light (or sun) and wait about 2 hours.
Happy developing daguerreotypes.
(Tea Party to the left.)
Once the plate is ready you can take off the amberlith (without concern about being in the dark), and fix it for about 30 seconds with some agitation, and then put it into tap water then distilled water. It can be done here, but the image is very fragile, so you have to cover it right away, or you can guild it with some gold chloride. The plate gets put on a special plate gilding stand (it helps to know a welder) and you put the gold chloride over it (it needs to be level) and torch it from the bottom.
Teacher is to right.
It should swirl and you want the swirl to go away, and it will usually get quite dark suddenly.
And then you pour distilled water over it. The plate needs to be dried with a hairdryer rather immediately and thoroughly (you will see the water run away). Then seal that thing (with a matt protecting it from glass) since it is still sensitive to everything.
This is mostly for me to remember I guess and in case anyone is interested in knowing more. But it is dangerous (it's elemental iodine that is used, and photographic chemicals are dangerous enough), and it is difficult to get good results, so I think you need someone to show you if you want to really do it. And silver (much more silver than what is used in paper/film) and gold is used on top of photography being expensive enough as it is. If you think people who use film are snarky about digital, think about these alternative process people who use plates and what they think of film.
