Announcing the Invention of Antonomous Rotating Medium Camera Back, Plus Other Fun in the Sun

Daguerreotype Made With Rotating Medium Camera Back 

Three Sun Spirals #1

Above image was made last week, but the road that led to its creation started over five years ago.  So, dear reader, do come along for this storytelling ride, as I try to reflect upon that path. 

The Sun.  How glorious it is.  It has inspired countless artists, and yours truly is no exception.  Heliography was the first name for photography, and it’s with that in mind that I started directly imaging the sun via daguerreotype method. I began my experiments during the pandemic of 2020.  Amid social distancing of late winter and spring of 2021, I yearned for tranquility of nature, and often found myself in local parks with a camera pointed up, toward the sun.  I welcomed its rays, letting them bathe the plate for hours, tracing the path of our nearest star as it went from tree to tree, or skimmed behind a singular arboreal specimen, bearing life-giving chi. 

Sun Paths 1

Sun Paths 2

Sun Paths 3

During these prolonged exposures, I had plenty of time for contemplation. I wondered what energies the sun was exchanging with the trees, what messages it was bringing them, what messages might it be carrying between them.  I imagined those messages to have been positive and reaffirming ones.  Then one day an image inspired me, and sparked a thought, an idea, a vision.  I wanted to turn the sun into a method of communication, and it occurred to me that this can be done by breaking up my long exposures into morse code.  Figuring out the timing wasn’t too hard there, and it was a real treat to see the final plates reflect back at me the joy I felt while making those exposures. 

Daguerreotype Morse Code Via Sun - Peace

Daguerreotype Morse Code Via Sun - Life

Upon completion of a short series of these solar affirmations, I waited for the next time inspiration strikes. This inspiration came in form of the 2024 a total solar eclipse, which passed over the continental United States.  I’ve always wanted to experience totality, but seeing it wasn’t enough.  I wanted to be the first person in modern era to capture totality in daguerreotype format.  A more detailed story of how this came to be can be glimpsed here, but I did succeed, and so below is once again my daguerreotype of a total solar eclipse during totality, done with no special camera setup and with no crew or sponsorship.  Not only were two daguerreotypes of the 2024 totality secured that April 8^th, but I pushed it one step further and, to my knowledge, became the first person in history to capture both daguerreotype and wet collodion images of the same totality, which truly made me very happy to have dared to do so. 

Daguerreotype of Total Solar Eclipse

Gelatin Silver Print from Wet Collodion Negative

of Total Solar Eclipse, Diamond Ring Moment

After getting a better result with capturing the sun’s corona than I could have hoped for, I turned my attention back to Morse code messages for a bit.  I was always interested in getting more detail in the scene itself, which is not trivial when shooting directly into the sun for hours. I kept pushing for longer and longer exposures, eventually coming up with this image of the Spreckels Pavilion organ, the sun there spelling “here comes the sun” and exposure taking just about 7 hours.  I can’t recall how many tries this took, but I did get to listen to a lot of wonderful performances, and eventually achieved the results I was after as far as my quest for an acceptable tonal scale within the scene. 

Here Comes The Sun - Morse Code Daguerreotype 

I still felt like I wasn’t done with solar work.  Spurred on by a creative collaboration with a wonderful South American daguerreotype artist, I started work once again.  This time I wanted to combine a few of my personal innovations within the world of daguerreotype.  In my PREVIOUS BLOG POST I describe how I made the image below, in which the code reads simply ‘SUN’. I chose pure silver art coins to place my images upon; their roundness pleased me greatly, as it seemed befitting while working with Solar images. 

Capture the Sun, Daguerreotype with Solar Morse Code

This daguerreotype merges my solar work with a positive/negative phenomenon achieved by partial erasure of initial image and subsequent exposure over that ghost.   I’ve been exploring this for a bit previously without much announcement, but, last fall, I did mention it to a few venerated makers of daguerreotypes, so I thought it was time to push it a bit further.  

For my next coin I chose a design of a coin that reads ‘FREEDOM’.  I’ve often pondered the concept of freedom and what it meant to me as well as others.  Within Taoist philosophy, which speaks strongly to me, freedom can mean being unbound by desire.  One of the ways to rid yourself of this pernicious feeling is to recognize the value of taking no action whenever action is not obviously needed.  Taking no action is a conscious choice, and is often times wiser than expanding effort with uncertain outcome.  Observing from the point of stillness the wheel of life as it revolves around us is a skill I yearn to foster within me, and so upon this coin I chose to spell Wu Wei, Chinese for non-ado. Ironically it took a lot of work to create this, but images must materialized once conceived, so it could not have been left undone.

Wu Wei - Non Ado - Daguerreotype view 1

Wu Wei - Non Ado - Daguerreotype view 2

There’s a lot of peculiarly beautiful effects that materialize while working with this, including rather pronounced outlines akin to those seen in Sabattier effect.  A most intriguing phenomenon occurs when once works with the ghost of the previous image in just the right way; when the plate viewed under traditional lighting configuration the ghost appears as negative, but when the angle of viewing is very acute to the light source a clear and bright positive image reveals itself while all else goes negative as always.  Certainly here’s a lot more to try there, and I do plan to carry out more work in this direction, but something else came to me, fully consuming my imagination over the course of the last two months….  

The roundness of the coins I was polishing became more and more intriguing to me.  Over and over again I polished and fumed my tiny message disks, and something was percolating in my mind, barely distinguishable echoes of an idea was were gently driving me forth.  I wanted to say more, but then again was it my place to speak?  I meditated upon the opening lines of passage 56 of Tao The Ching – those who know do not talk, those who talk do not know.   It seemed to me that these days that’s been truer than ever, and so I wanted to try and somehow spell that with my beloved solar Morse code method.  While on the previous coin I did manage to get the two lines of code to be fairly parallel, that part was actually more difficult than someone who hasn’t tried this would likely imagine.  Having that experience behind me I was not about to try and make several long lines that would be required to spell what I wanted.  In times of quiet artful meditation, which are my favorite times, I pondered how I could accomplish this.  One day this August, I was looking at a vinyl Quadrophenia record by The Who, a record I bought simply for its cover art, as I’ve never owned a record player.  Suddenly it dawned on me that I can use the same principle to record way longer solar Morse code messages on my daguerreotypes if only I wrote them in a spiral!  I sat there flabbergasted at the possibility while simultaneously overwhelmed by how much work it would be to see this idea come to fruition.  Over the next couple of weeks I sketched and calculated, then sketched and calculated again.  When an object moves in a fairly straight line and at constant speed, such as the sun in the sky, it’s not too difficult to figure out its rate of travel.  Things get a lot more complex though if we wish to make that straight-traveling object go in a spiral.  The vision was clear though, all that was left was to make it happen.  

Initial Calculations and Image Conception

Calculations of Morse Code timing

Preliminary drawings for Rotating Camera Medium Design

Preliminary drawings for Rotating Camera Medium Design

My work had to be two-pronged: figuring out the timing of my exposures and building the camera back that would rotate my daguerreotype during exposure.  

I last had paid attention to calculus in college, completing the third semester in 1996. Imagine my surprise when I had to remember the basics of that discipline in order to figure out the rate of increase in speed of travel of the sun along a rotating spiral path.  I’m glad I had a friend who sat me down and helped to make this process a bit more understandable, though it still took me a good number of days to complete all the calculations.  Finally I arrived at the following timing sequence of 144 exposures over the span of 24 minutes. 

 

Morse Code Exposure timing Sequence for Rotating Medium Camera Back

Alongside with figuring out timing I worked with a local fella who is good with a 3D printer on a design for a camera back unlike no other ever created.  It’ nothing too complex to be honest, just an original idea that happened to have landed within reach of my imagination.  If one considers the suns rate of travel across the sky, maximum motor speed becomes apparent. We must next devise a lightproof back that fits our existing view camera, and connect the motor to a plate holder within it via a rod or other means. Other than making sure our focal plane is right there’s not much more to it.  It astonished me to think that nothing like this has ever been done.  The only remotely similar mechanism like this is one used in de-rotator cameras in astro-photography, which are built into major telescopes in a few existing observatories.  There the photographic medium is rotated in opposite direction to that of Earth, at the speed exactly matching that of the Earth.  Super cool indeed, but rather different from what I was thinking. 

First prototype of the photographic rotating medium camera back was just to see how things will fit.  Second one worked rather well, but my 3D printing friend did suggest a few improvements, which we incorporated in the third iteration.  I’m glad that he was already working on that third design while I was testing out version two.  There was a heat wave in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, with temperatures reaching 107°F in the shade by my studio.   There was no way I could contain my excitement though, and I decided to make an hour-long exposure in order to capture the first spiral image of the sun to exist.  Needless to say the camera must be in direct sun when shooting, and placing a white mask over it with just a hole for the lens didn’t help much.  There was so much heat radiating from the pavement and walls that the plastic softened and my gears pushed themselves apart, stopping rotation mid-exposure.  I was rather distraught upon this discovery, but acted swiftly.  I brought the back into the sun again, warming it up to the point where it became soft again, and bent it back to where gears were once again in correct contact. After that I made the following two exposures.  First a single spiral as proof of concept, an image was erased, as I don’t have an infinite amount of silver to play with, sadly so.  The next logical step was to try multiple exposures, and that’s how the second image came about, which I liked enough to keep.  Version two didn’t have bushings in it, and the drive shaft was not moving super smoothly, thus you see brighter spots where rotation slowed down by just a bit.  I think I like that imperfection, it feels more organic that way, as if the path of the sun has a heartbeat pattern to it. 

 

First Test of Rotating Medium Camera Back

Sun Spirals - Daguerreotype Made With

Rotating Medium Camera Back

  After that came time to give my original Morse code goal a try.  I was once again grateful for the help of my friends, who sat with me through many failed attempts helping me keep exposures at their precise designated times.  Of course, this whole procedure could be made a lot simpler and more exact with the use of a computer-triggered shutter system like a solenoid, but I didn’t have neither enough time not resources to start building yet another component with thus system, besides it really was fun to act as a shutter with 288 combined on and off motions.  Contained inside the spiral solar Morse code message is another self-portrait ghost, that must be viewed in a very specific angle to light in order to see that image as a positive. Since most every person who sees these images tends to ask what the code reads, I decided to include a mat with an engraved translation. 

Morse Code Via Sun Made With

Rotating Medium Camera Back

Morse Code Via Sun Made With

Rotating Medium Camera Back

Morse Code Via Sun Made With

Rotating Medium Camera Back

Back of Silver Coin

Lastly, just about ten days ago, it occurred to me that spirals don’t have to originate in the center, and by offsetting rotation axis I could get some rather nifty interactions between multiple spirals, and that’s how the image at the top of this entry came to exist.  

I haven’t felt this energized in a while, and I will certainly be keeping my faithful readers up to date when something is ready to show.  In the meantime it’s probably worth mentioning that less than 48hours ago I did file a provisional patent application for a mechanist described and shown above, including of course a provision that it can be made with either direct or geared motor drives. There are a ton of fun possible with this device other than making spirals from the sun via daguerreotype, I hope to get to that fun at some point. For now I’m just happy to find myself in uncharted territory once again, after all, it’s the uncharted territories of the art forest that haver the tastiest berries ready for picking.   

 

Carry on my friends, carry on and keep it creative! 

Anton

 P.S. I have filed a provisional patent for a Photographic Rotating Medium Camera Back, and am in the process of converting it to a full patent application. Not that I think there is any great financial benefit here to be had, as these images are so esoteric that I don't foresee there being much of a market for such backs, but it's still good to know that there's a patent out there with my name on it, just for posterity's sake. 

Rotating Medium Camera Back at Work

Daguerreotype with Sabattier Effect upon Silver Coin with Solarization and Morse Code

   Last year, in Hartford, there was a wonderful moment when I was in the company of six modern daguerreotypists, with some of most preeminent persons in the field being present.  The conversation was jovial and earnest, with briskly changing topics of wide array.  For a brief moment the chat drifted toward processes taking place during daguerreotype image-particle formation.  I'm not an expert in this by any means, as I've never had opportunities to work with  laboratory equipment that is needed for proper analysis of such things, so I was mostly a fly on the wall there, while drawings of electro-chemical charges were sketched in pencil atop an authentic Jenny Lind daguerreotype-era posing table.  There was one thing though that I feel I may have contributed.  I mentioned the purposeful use of latent ghost image with in some of my works, and showed a few examples where I utilized this seemingly unexplored method of image-making. I explained that to achieve this my intermediary images were wiped without being gilded, which seems to strongly suggest that voids in silver found beneath image particles were initially formed by process of development.  For the past few months I've been pondering this, and waiting to dive back into image creation.  As luck would have it, the winged mused of inspiration made its way to me all the way from Brazil.  A collaborative game initiated by Simone Wicca, a very creative modern daguerreotype artist from San Paolo, spurred on the appearance of the image below. 

Sun - Daguerreotype Sabattier Effect and Morsiple Exposure on Silver Coin - View 1

Sun - Daguerreotype Sabattier Effect and Morsiple Exposure on Silver Coin - View 2

  The game Simone came up with involves us alternately setting a theme for an image and then interpreting that theme however we wish with a daguerreotype.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Well, not if you overthink everything like I usually do...   The first assignment was set by Simone, and it was to "capture a sun ray and hold it in hermetic vessel".   I will admit that upon reading this my mind went blank.  By their essence each daguerreotype made via natural light is already capturing a sun beam, and all finished daguerreotypes themselves become hermetic vessels upon being finished and sealed. This thought messed with my mind, as I didn't want to make 'just another dag', and so it took me forever and a half to come up with the image featured here.  

  Continuing my personal journey into exploring alternative substrates to make dags with, I had an idea of seeing how it would work on a coin made of 999 silver.  While the official US mint has issued a few such coins that I could have used, it is not only illegal to destroy currency, but also seemed rather boring to me. Instead I looked around and found that a few private mints dealing with precious metals make coins with all sorts of cool designs.  Golden State Mint is located in Florida, and coin that I purchased was minted by them around 2016 (just about the time when I got decent at making daguerreotypes).  Part of Chris Duane's Silver Bullet Silver Shield series, this coin was designed by Heidi Wastweet, and it deals with concepts of debt slavery in a satirical manner, which was appealing to me.  Also, the innermost text on the side that I kept intact reads "listen to all, follow none", and this has been my approach to the art of photography and life in general.  

  Once proper equipment was procured, it actually took almost no time to shave off the deign from one side of the coin and to produce a mirror polish where once a rather high-relief image of a skeleton-banker once appeared. To do this I first employed a belt sander with 60 grit paper, and then 180 grit, after which I laid some 400 grit sand paper on a table and manually smoothed it a bit more. Then it was on to NuShine SII and orbital sander, and finishing with lamp black as always. 

  Without diving too deep into all the symbolism this image is laden with, I'll touch briefly upon a few themes and let the reader's imagination roam and pick up on more minute nuances. 

  Diameter of this coin is 39mm.  In Taoist practice odd numbers under 10 are considered to be that of heaven and movement, while even numbers relate Earth and stillness. 3 and 9 are most powerful of the heavenly set, because three gives birth to myriad of things and what can be stronger than that other than three threes? Sun resides in heaven, and Simone's theme made it all too natural to strive to fix the sun directly upon this object. 

  Some of my readers may have seen my Morsiple Exposure post from 2021, where I figured out not to use the movement of the sun across the heavens in combination with Morse Code to write out simple messages. Morse code having strict rules about length of pauses and dashes as they relate to width of dots meant that exposure times are nonnegotiable.  As it happens, spelling the word SUN takes 48min to execute, which is my age at the moment.  My mind wanders now thinking that, unlike 3 and 9, 4 and 8 are both Earthly numbers, but somehow 4+8=12 and 1+2=3, so....

  Things and people fluctuate between positive and negative right before our eyes, and so I ventured to create an image where me and the sun would both switch back and forth.  Ordinarily daguerreotypes are best viewed by reflecting something dark into it while lighting the face.  When one reflects something bright into the silver mirror that is daguerreotype, like a light source or the sky, the image becomes negative.  The use of latent ghost image allowed me to create a daguerreotype that is viewable in both lighting scenarios, and in fact must be appreciated in both. When dark values are reflected into it as usual, my image is negative and Morse-code-sun is positive. However, as soon as you start bringing the angle of this daguerreotype close to reflecting sun or another light source, the sun becomes negative, while my self portrait gains back all its original positive values in full detail. 

  All daguerreotypes are best viewed while being hand-held by the viewer, with this one being no exception.  The 52 second video below attempts to capture such experience.  First, two stills are shown again, then you can see the coin with water on it just about to be gilded.  At the end we see the finished piece as it appears in artificial daylight balanced light and then direct sun. 

  As hard as I looked, I couldn't find any previous examples of daguerreotypes of this nature.  While someone may have made an image on a coin, I'll be actually really surprised if nobody has, I don't think anyone has previously employed what basically amounts to the good old Sabattier Effect with daguerreotype medium, so I believe this is the first time.  I was truly pleased with the final result of my latest experiment and the Mackie line effects achieved, and I'll keep exploring this avenue a bit more. 

  Anton 

More Work On Solid Silver Plates, Daguerreian Dreamscape Series Initiation And More

  In my previous post I detailed my start of experimenting with making daguerreotypes on solid fine silver plates.  At that point I only had 18 gauge silver plates to worth with, which are approximately 1.02mm thick.  After making and erasing 200+ images on one plate, barely any silver was gone, and I realized that 18-gauge was likely overkill, and decided to see what what it would be like to work with thinner gauges. 

  First though, I wanted to make an image, a fun and deeply personal image, an homage to The Beatles, the band which taught me a lot of English when I was growing up in soviet Moscow.  Bootlegged tapes and hand-typed lyrics that were passed around underground, provided me with much joy against the drab backdrop of a growing up in a collapsing state.  I learned all their songs phonetically, long before being able to distinguish between each word, and I remember a few instances of singing a line to my English teacher in order for her to decipher it.  One of the songs I loved the most was Here Comes The Sun.  It was infinitely happy, and the lyrics were also simple enough for me to understand.  I decided to employ my Morsiple Exposure method once again, this time pushing the method a bit further, and hoping to catch some decent detail in foreground during a brutal 5.5 hour exposure.   I chose the historic Spreckels Organ as the setting for this.  World's largest outdoor organ seemed appropriate to pair with one of the world's most beloved bands.  The trick was that the organ is only open to view for just over an hour on Sundays from 2pm to just past 3pm, during the free performances that are held year-round. I knew that during most of the time I would be writing out my Morse code message using the sun, the organ pipes would be shielded by the metal rolling door, so with the best possible exposure all I could hope for was a ghost of the actual pipes as they are exposed 'through' the door.  To make the most of it, I timed my exposure in such a way that the series of dashes, which happen to all be mostly bunched together, were all exposed while the door was open and organ pipes were visible.  Total length of actual exposure time was 74.5min. Including the spaces though, the whole experience took over five hours.  Below is the framed 4x5 daguerreotype on 18-gauge solid silver plate, in which "Here Comes The Sun" is spelled out in Morse code using the sun.  I decided to frame it in a way that shows the plate in full, with all the joyful accidents that occurred along the edges.  In order to do so, six spacers made of 30-gauge fine silver strips were placed around the edges. 

  While I was working on the above image, two more silver plates arrived, this time of thinner gauges.  I may have mentioned this before, but in the USA there seems to be only one supplier of fine silver sheets, and there are only two options as far as width of the sheet you're buying - 12in or 6in.  12in width is great, as it easily cuts into three 4in increments, or 8+4.  As I wasn't sure if these thinner plates would work out at all, I didn't want to potentially throw away bunch of money, so I chose the 6in wide sheets, and ordered them in 3 inch length.  This would also provide me with an opportunity to work with a panoramic format, even though a rather miniature one. 

  Upon receiving the plates and examining them, I did think that perhaps I went too thin.  22-gauge is 0.644mm and 23-gauge is 0.573mm, and they are only available in 1/4 hard strength, with a bushed finish surface, which takes a good amount of effort to polish off initially.  Both plates seemed almost too flimsy to work with, and I had to alter my usual polishing methods in order not to bend them.  I would say that 22-gauge is as thin as I'll go in the future, but if I have enough funds I'd probably prefer 20-gauge.  I did however just order another 22-gauge 6x3in plate, intended for an image that I'll touch upon a little later in this post. 

  After figuring out a decent way to safely polish such thin sheets of silver, I was faced with my usual mental block regarding what image is it that actually deserves a place upon the plates. Michelangelo is said to have viewed creation of his sculptures as liberating them from marble, and I can't help but relate to that sentiment in regards to working with daguerreotype medium.  Each time a nanostructure of crystals grows upon an exposed plate, a part of my vision of nature and existence is released from a solid silver surface, and I dare not take that for granted.  

  Luckily, inspiration for the first image came in a form of this blog entry by Simone Wicca, a photographic artist based in Brazil, in which she interviews Ken Nelson, who can only be described as a giant and a legend within the world of modern daguerreotype.  Ken has been making daguerreotypes for one year longer than I've been alive, and commands a sea of knowledge of both the technique itself and of it's development in historic and modern times.  I highly recommend reading that interview, and look forward to more interviews that Simone has planned. 

  The last image supplementing that interview is titled "My Back Yard, Rochester, New York", and that image resonated with me as soon as I saw it.  It looks like such a peaceful and relaxing place, with fallen autumn leaves all around a shadowed picnic bench, with a classic wooden fence delineating paradise's borders.  Some day I'd love to have a back yard like that, but that's likely beyond the realm of possibilities in this lifetime.  However, I've been renting my darkroom and studio space for 15 years now, and every time I walk up the plastic stairs to my metal door, I do get a view of someone else's back yard, and that view has seen me through a lot, and vice versa. Over the last decade and a half, I had a chance to learn multiple photographic techniques as well as to test a lot of various equipment and chemistry.   Every time I tested a new lens, or collodion formula, made paper negatives of tried my first daguerreotypes, I would place the camera on the stairs by my studio, and make images of that back yard. At first I didn't keep them, but then decided that I might as well make it a running documentary, and so at this point I probably have close to 100 4x5in tintypes of that yard.  For a long time there was a beautiful 40ft tall tree there in the back by the fence.  The squat building in foreground was a burned out and fully gutted garage and storage space, missing a roof and housing only rodents.  A lone elderly hoarder lady lived in the large house in back, while the owner, a man in his 70s with a tremendous white beard, occupied one of the apartments in the front house, while renting out the other half as well.  Every once in a while I would see the old lady emerge from the door facing my stairs and slide a bowl of cat food onto the lower part of the roof above her.  Cats came around in droves, and at times there would be 20+ of those bowls up there, in the shade of that beautiful tree.  Meanwhile my domain ended at the fence the reader can see at the very bottom of the following images.  Time passed, and the owner passed with it. In his place came his daughter, who had her own great life in Norther California, and just saw the property as fantastic extra income.  A great deal of remodeling was done on the yard to make it look like something seen on good real estate ads, old lady was evicted, burned down garage made into a studio apartment, and the tree was cut down and uprooted, for nobody needs trees and their pesky falling leaves these days.  I have tintypes of the whole process, including the day the tree was killed, with one merciless arborist still up there about 25ft in the air on the last remaining large branch.  That back yard has so much potential, but it's never really used.  I've seen that grill fired up less than ten times over the last few years, and the raised vegetable beds are usually fallow as well.  The bare minimum succulents don't take much care, and neither does that red plant with a straight stem and pointy leaves. And of course there's fake grass where they for some reason chose not to put sandy dirt.  But the potential is there, and I see that potential day in and day out.  The rest of my view includes seemingly infinite roofs of apartment buildings and other small structures.  

  Having a panoramic format plates gave me a chance to get everything in one frame, while generally all my images focused just on the back yard that is directly in front of my stairwell.  Fitting it all in actually proved a bit tougher than I thought it would, but after a while I was able to do so with the aid of an 8x10in camera and a 90mm Nikkor-W lens.  This view is looking almost directly to the south, so no matter the time of day, if it's sunny it's really high in contrast. Despite that, my tintypes always seemed to have full shadow detail while holding the highlights without blowing them out.  Collodion and daguerreotype mediums are reputed to have about the same light spectrum sensitivity, purportedly being sensitive mainly to UV and blue wavelengths.  A good deal of discussion of various methods aimed at extending this sensitivity range in daguerreotypes can be found in writings both old and new.  Achieving detail in green or red foliage is said to benefit from this trick or that.  Other efforts focus on controlling contrast, which is normally thought of as being too high to hold more than a few stops of light.  In my previous practices, I've noticed that with a decently fumed and exposed plate I didn't seem to have those issues, and so when I saw that back yard image by Mr. Nelson, and the discussion around it, I was very much curious about how well I can capture my 'not my back yard' scene in full afternoon sunlight and not very open shadows.  It took me a couple of tries, but below is the resulting daguerreotype image, on 22-gauge solid silver plate, followed by an completely unedited image made with an iPhone 15 just about 10min after the daguerreotype was captured (thus the shadow changing a bit between the two images).  In order to make the comparison easier, I flipped the iPhone image left to right. 

  Exposure for the above plate was 11 seconds at f11, and I think 9 seconds would have actually looked a little better.  I was rather pleased with how the green and red toned recorded, as well as shadow detail in raised plant beds and under the bush behind the cactus. 

  Having the one 23-gauge plate left, I waited for inspiration once again, and this time it came to me in a dream.  During those wonderful afternoon naps, when the brain drifts in and out of sleep, short but vivid dreams seem to play hopscotch between my eyes and cranium.  In one such fleeting yet warm vision I felt I was a kind of a mystical broker, overseeing allegorical negotiations between a feather and a thistle.  Our offers of peace were being largely stonewalled, but hope never faded.  After a few days in the darkroom and studio, the image below came to be. 

  This is the beginning of what I plan to be a long-running series called Daguerreian Dreamscapes.  I plan on all of images being on solid silver plates and 6x3in in size, and, as mentioned above, next plate is on the way to me now.  I eagerly await whatever compelling imagery my subliminal realms unveil to me.

  Anton

200 Daguerreotypes In Two Months, One Silver Plate's Adventures

  Earlier this year, I've decided to restart my daguerreotype work with a new passion.  There is still so much more beauty hidden in plain sight within this noble technique, and to find and rouse that beauty is my ultimate goal.  Since the completion of the Chess Series in 2022, the only meaningful daguerreotypes I produced were the ones of the Total Solar Eclipse in Aprif of 2024. I was growing rusty, and I knew it.  So, in the last 55 days, I went into overdrive mode and made approximately 215 daguerreotype images, and below is a brief account of those activities. 

  I estimated that in order to get my image quality back to where I would be happy with, I would have to make at least a hundred images, and quite possibly more.  This daunting perspective got me thinking foremost of the financial aspect of making that many plates.  And in fact, for the past three years, it was indeed this fiscal barrier that kept me from restarting my experiments in opalescence, and induced my prolonged break. I won't bore the reader with details of various electroplating suppliers and options one could chose with them, or with my thoughts on clad vs. plated silver, or with approximations of how many times on average one can erase a daguerreotype image upon different plates before they have to be discarded.  As of today the cost of a single 4x5in plate ranges at about US$100-130, and I will omit here a long tangent about the possibility of electroplating on your own, which in theory could save some money if not time. I figured though, that even with a very high estimate of me being able to make an erase maybe 15 images per plate (though in reality some plates are more like 3-4 times, others 7-10), it would cost me at the very least $2000-2500 to make 300 images..

  After putting my thinking cap on, I went a different way.  Instead of dealing with going through silver on plate after plate and watching $100 at a time go into the waste bin, I decided to buy a solid 99.9% silver plate.  There is an artist in China working on solid silver plates, and I did ask him for advice on this, unfortunately I never did hear back from him.  Rio Grande is the only supplier that I have found in the US that sells solid silver in sheets (great monopoly to have, eh).  They do have a very decent selection though, and much more experimenting is still possible, but for now I decided to buy what I thought would be the best strength and thickness.  It took me a while to talk myself into this expense, but the only other option was buying 200 or so plates elsewhere, only to have them all erased down to copper during my future certain trials and tribulations.

  I settled on 18 gauge (~1.02mm thick) quarter hard stock.  Unfortunately that stock comes only in 12in width, and it is cut lengthwise to order.  I bought a 12x5in strip, and paid right around $650 for it, which, after some careful cutting, gave me three 4x5in plates at just about $220 each.  I put one plate aside, and it remains still untouched, with original brushed matte finish it came with.   Upon the second plate I made a fun image that I very much enjoy, which will likely not be erased as it may end up in an upcoming exhibit, and then it would be a true shame to erase it even if it's not purchased.   The third plate however was facing my full wrath, which I unleashed with full fury.

  For once in my life I could make images and not think of the cost while erasing image after image.  It was truly liberating and addictive.  At first I set out to make one or two images per day.  After a few days though it became clear to me that I that pace was not sufficient and I upped it to a minimum of three daily.  I have not missed a day since February 28th, and several days up to nine images were made and immediately erased.  As I was going, I placed each fixed and dried image on my copy stand and quickly copied it using my phone camera.  Yesterday I added image 200 to that album, and so today is the first day in almost two months that I'm not taking a break from polishing and fuming.

  As I mentioned above, I knew things weren't gonna go smoothly as soon as I picked up the polisher again.  There are many aspects of daguerreotype practice that are not exactly like riding a bike, and so I predicted setbacks in my quest to get quality and consistency of my images to be where I wanted.  My first problem though was of such peculiar nature that it literally took me almost all of the first 100 images to narrow down and eliminate.  After that issue was gone, of course others remained, but they were slowly improved upon, and now, after 200+ plates, I'm finally feeling like my bearings are somewhat regained.    The final battle of course is the one against the army of black spots, but I will always remember what the late and truly great Irving Pobboravsky told me on this subject, that "without some spots it's not a true daguerreotype".  I'm still gonna try to keep them in check though, for Irving too. 

  After the main seemed to have been resolved, I did have some fun playing with the range of tone that daguerreotypes can yield, and below are examples of some of the images that only existed for brief moments.   Some are nothing special, while a few I did feel rather sad while erasing.  Do pardon the poor quality of these copies, they are but my reference photos of exposures and fuming variations, and are were never meant to be seen as much more than that.  The only editing done to images below was done in the standard iPhone Photos app, and was aimed at getting the picture to look as closely to what I was seeing on the plate in terms of brightness and tone. 

  All of the images in this post were not gilded before erasing.  Gilding does greatly improve the look of daguerreotypes. Addition of gold drops the shadows to that rich smooth black that defines a good plate, it also markedly raises highlight brightness.  At some point during this darkroom run, I made a very simple example for myself, which some may find informational as well.  Upon one plate with my standard studio composition that you see in one of the images above, I performed the following experiment.  After fixing and drying it, I placed the plate upon the gilding stand, and poured a very small amount of gilding solution, about 5ml worth. It was only enough to make a puddle in the middle, which I proceeded to heat up in my usual manner, thus gilding only the center of the image.  Here's the result, from which you can use your imaginations, and approximately extrapolate how the other images here would have looked should they have been gilded. 

  Another avenue I embarked upon in these past two months, was trying out for myself a few of the myths and legends I've read in various places.   These tales span from 19th century, right though the 20th and into modern age.  They promise wondrous results, and so I was eager to see for myself the marvelous benefits of the findings left to us my many learned men through history, and which to this day are being espoused from the pulpit.  Alas, after spending at least a week on careful investigation, none of those promises and speculations, led to anything but frustration.  Below are a few examples of those investigations, as well as a couple random bromine and iodine quadrant tests just for fun. 

  And how is our single solid silver plate after all this use an abuse? It's just fine and dandy, thank you very much! I recall there having been at least 4-5 images that I simply forgot to copy, maybe as many that failed to such a degree that I couldn't even learn from them and so chose not to copy those, and maybe another few times when something went awry during the fuming stage, and so I had to polish off that deposit of iodides and bromides.  So, all in all this one plate I was working with went through at l least 215 polish backs!  I carefully measured the untouched control plate, and found that my cutting was unusually precise, and that the still unused plate was exactly the same width and length as the one I was using.  After weighing them both, I found that after 200+ polish-backs the plate I'm working with lost only 4 grams!  Unpolished plate weighed in at 134.72g, and the used one was 130.62.  Originally my calculations were as follows.  I figured that with each polishing I must take off at least 2 micrometers worth of silver in order to get the image erased thoroughly enough for it not to come up as a ghost in the next shot. there are 1000 micrometers in 1mm, but of course you can't just erase the plate into thin air, at some point it will become so thin that it will bend.  I figured I could take my 1.02mm plate to maybe 0.6mm or if I'm lucky to 0.5mm before it's too thin to work with.  This would have given me let's say 500 micrometers to work with, so 250 images. That was my projection.  I was wrong though.  Maybe 2mic is what one needs to take off once the image has been gilded, and of all the images I made I only gilded 4-5 of them, so I'm probably erasing less than 1mic every time that I'm taking off a non-gilded shot.  Knowing that I'm missing 4g out of 134 leaves me to follow the following conclusion.  Taking the plate down from 1mm thickness to 0.9mm should reduce it's weight by 10%, which is 13.4g.  The 215 erasures I've performed only lost 4g, so I there's still over 9 grams to go, so another 500 ungilded images just to get it to to 0.9mm, and I don't intend to stop there.

  I will use this plate for all my upcoming experiments, and will see how many hundreds of images it will hold before it's no longer workable.  As the plate gets thinner and thinner, I will finally be able to see what thinner gauges of silver sheets I can get in the future and not have them be too flimsy to work with.  For now, I think I'm safe in saying that if you want to try this and want to get a slightly cheaper plate, 20 gauge quarter hard silver sheet should work just fine, as it's only 0.2mm thinner, and I think it won't bend too easily.  Then again, that depends on individual polishing methods, and that's an entirely different topic. After a few days break, I'm planning to get back to using this plate over and over again, in search of something truly new and beautiful.  Once I feel I'm on the right track, I'll use my regular electroplated plates to hopefully capture some images worth keeping.  It is truly freeing though to work with a solid silver plate and to have zero worries about seeing first signs of copper peeking through every time I pick up the buffing materials.  Seems to be a reasonable thing to do.

  Onward, to new and exciting discoveries my friends!

Anton