The Daguerreotype: Contemporary work by Jonathan Danforth

I’ve been experimenting with my recently acquired lens this week. Having a maximum aperture of f/5.6 I didn’t expect that the Schneider Super Symmar XL 150mm would be terribly much faster than my stalwart Ektar f/6.3. True, the new Schneider is only ^1/3 of a stop faster than the Ektar but today’s results belied that tiny fraction of a hole. Is a fraction of a hole still a hole? I smell a kōan in there somewhere.

My note’s from the exposure I tried today showed a sky at EV-15 ^2/3, and grass at EV-13^1/3 yet my exposure of one minute yielded overexposure.  Curious.  My instinct tells me that this has something to do with UV transmission.  A cursory review of the technical data available from Schenider delivers a bewildering array of charts and graphs yet deeper examination yields some useful nuggets.

The transmittance diagram shows level response from ~480nm to ~640nm although to be fair, the transmittal range of the lens below 80% starts and ends at ~400nm and over 700nm respectively.  My image today was predominantly battleship gray so color isn’t an issue but UV could be.

I’m still researching… more later.

J

Great pictures of a contemporary daguerreotypist’s iodine fuming box.

These images are over at a new blog called The Daguerreotypist by Andy.

Allow me to plug the following: Dennis Waters, Fine Daguerreotypes.  The Waters family is well know in the daguerreotype community for scholarly research and restoration services.  Just take a glance at their restoration page and you’ll be amazed; I am.

A friend of mine came to me recently with a family daguerreotype that was in poor shape.  I contacted Casey Waters on her behalf for the restoration.  Casey’s response was swift and professional.  I expect fine results.

Daguerreotype restoration is tricky business; I want no part of it.  I seal my own daguerreotypes and I have a basic understanding of what’s going on but I am also confident in my ability to replace a daguerreotype if I screw it up.  Vintage daguerreotypes?  No so.

The resealing process is simple enough…  I’ve seen period examples enough times to know that replacing the glass on the daguerreotype plate package does a world of good for improving the appearance and legibility of the image.  When it comes to fungus, deterioration, cookie crumbs, and other extraneous adulterants, however, there are more potentially damaging procedures (see here) to follow.  It is these procedures that I’m not willing to practice.  I encourage you to do the same especially on a vintage piece.

From 7/27/2008 - 8/1/2008 daguerreotype master (pater familias, perhaps) Jerry Spagnoli will be teaching the Becquerel method of daguerreotypie at a workshop at The Photographer’s Formulary.

I attended a similar workshop in North Carolina a few years ago and it really whet my appetite. Being a learns-by-doing kind of guy, I found the small class size and topical focus to be enormously helpful in creating daguerreotypes on my own.

I can’t say that everything I know about daguerreotypes is because of Jerry but I will tell you that it sure is a healthy percentage. Don’t miss the opportunity to study with a real master of the art.

The Photographer’s Formulary is a wonderful stop online and I can only imagine that they provide an equally fun shopping experience in person. Bring some pocket money!

I recently updated this site to a new version of Wordpress, the content management system that I use.  Everything seems to be working fine but please drop me a line if you see any problems.  I also tweaked the code so that the header displays properly in Internet Explorer.

Happy daguerreotyping!