The Daguerreotype: Contemporary work by Jonathan Danforth

If you have surmounted the various steps of making Daguerreotype plates, equipping your darkroom, buying a buffing machine, rigging your camera, and convincing your friends to stop laughing at you, you may be wandering exactly what to DO with your sensitized Daguerreotype plate once it’s in your camera.

Well friends, I give you this: Becquerel Daguerreotype Exposure Guidelines.

I made this little cheat sheet a couple of years ago and I periodically modify it as my experience teaches me new things about Daguerreotypes. I carry a printout of the cheat sheet for easy reference and I scribble all over it constantly.

The times on this sheet are largely based on my experience with some degree of frightening mathematical calculations that I’m happy to let Microsoft Excel do for me automagically. My crappy camera lens has a maximum aperture of f/6.3 if you’re wondering why such an arcane number is on my reference list.

Keep in mind when you’re making your exposure calculations that (more…)

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Friends, practitioners, and admirers of the antique Daguerreotype photography method gathered today for the annual meeting of The Daguerreian Society in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This year’s event runs through Sunday 11/19/2006.
The Daguerreotype, named for its inventor Louis Daguerre and invented in 1839, was the first commercially successful photographic method. Being made on silver-plated pieces of copper, Daguerreotypes are unique and irreproducible images that were immediately treasured. Various descriptions of the process can be found at shinyphotos.com, newdags.com, and wikipedia.com.

Accounts vary but the Daguerreotype didn’t survive long as a practical method of photography. Like Betamax, the qualitatively superior nemesis of the VHS tape, the Daguerreotype was swiftly replaced by the less expensive tintype and, later, various other formats that allowed for the production of the paper prints that (more…)

I have just started listening to a very good podcast produced by photographer Jeff Curto called Camera Position. In the show, Jeff discusses the very important non-technical aspects of photography that are so frequently neglected in the magazines with some notable exceptions. Camera Position is a wonderful rest stop on the highway of tiresome technical publications.

Below is an e-mail I wrote to Jeff regarding a recent episode that hits close to home.

Jeff,

I’ve only recently discovered your excellent podcast. The podcast world is replete with technically oriented material but very little creative, emotional, and philosophical discussion of photography. Yours is a welcome addition to my playlists. I particularly enjoyed your recent show, “It’s About Time.” The contrast of Sato and Winogrand was insightful.

There’s another condition of time that you didn’t hit on in this analysis: (more…)

Music is very important to me. Perhaps the best proof of this is in the darkroom worksheet that I prepared a few years ago. When working in the darkroom, I had to take meticulous notes in order to reproduce a print precisely from a given negative. Among entries such as exposure, ambient temperature, paper used, and other technical details, I put in a field for music. You see, music has a particularly strong effect on my mood and I found that my prints would be different if I was listening to a different genre of music.

I have been listening to Wally’s broadcast over at Absinthe Radio for some time now and I check in on the website periodically. The playlist runs the gamut from (more…)

After reports from users and visitors about the verbosity of my site’s name, I have splurged and purchased a new domain name: shinyphotos.com. Get it? I make photos and they’re shiny.  Update your bookmarks!
-Jonathan