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 

Wet Collodion April 8th 2024 Total Eclipse - Lithographic Gelatin Silver Final Printing

  Last April I embarked on a mission, which took me all the way to Alton, Missouri.  The goal was to see if I could capture the total solar eclipse with both daguerreotype and wet collodion mediums, while having no specialized equipment and with no assistants either.  The journey and it's fruits are described HERE, with finished daguerreotypes can be seen HERE.  Having miraculously secured a 4x5in wet collodion negative of the diamond ring moment of sun's reemergence, I chose to make two editions of prints on vintage gelatin silver paper and using lithographic developer, in order to add even more serendipity to the process.

  First printing focused solely and squarely upon the conjunction of sun and moon, centered and enlarged to almost fill the page.  It then took me some months to process what I wanted to see in the second edition.  I won't bore the reader with repeating what fun lith printing with gelatin silver paper is, as one can find that info in my post about the first round of images, but I decided to stick with that, as well as to continue using vintage photo papers like Kodak's Ektalure and Fine Art, Luminos Charcoal R, and others, but this time I only made prints in 11x14 and 16x20 format, forgoing 8x10 altogether.

  With this second and final edition, I wanted to more personally convey my experience of the eclipse and the emotions that those 3.5 minutes so strongly evoked.  I recall being awestruck at the surreal nature of what was happening, with day turning into night and colors fading before my very eyes. It seemed like reality glitched for a second, and the sky became host to a most amusing and abstract art installation, a fleeting performance by nature of it's best time sensitive installation. I was also overwhelmed by Nature that was happening all around me.  Not only were celestial bodies lined up in most peculiar and perfect ways, but I was also in the depth of a lush forest, an environment I thoroughly enjoy.  Below are some examples of 11x14 and 16x20in prints that were completed recently.  With 11x14in I decided to give a nod to Man Ray and the abstract movement of his time, with somewhat organic shapes mysteriously appearing in random manner in what is usually a clear sky.  In 16x20in images, those shapes are replaced with plant material, and in a way I hear them faintly whispering of work by Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot.  As with the first edition, each print was selectively bleached and selenium toned. 

  Above prints are available for purchase, feel free to use the email mentioned in contact page her to send an inquiry.   Printing of this negative is now done forever, as I placed a thick layer of varnish on it.  That varnish contains a myriad dust particles, large and small, so the negative itself is preserved, but basically unprintable. I'm elated to have completed this project and to have already sold a few prints from both first and second edition.  My art is my only source of income, and sales allow me not only to survive, but to dream of new heights to achieve within the medium I love so dearly.

Anton

Brief Wet Collodion Adventure - Some Tintypes of the Southern US

   Not long ago, I embarked upon a quick trip to some parts of the country I haven't explored yet, and, naturally, I carried a wet plate setup with me to see what sights inspire me to make some tintypes.  This trip was actually mainly concentrated on daguerreotypes, both historic and modern, but in this post I'll stick solely to collodion, with an additional historical treat at the end.  

  My objective was to explore a little bit of the gulf coast, and visit Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile, along with a few National Parks that can be found in Texas on the way back home.  The first plates on this journey were made right after I crossed the mighty Mississippi, in Baton Rouge.  I stopped for a bit of a hike along the river, and noticed the overabundance of white, sun-bleached shells that lined the shoreline in all directions.  After finding a shady place to park, as it was about 90F at the time, I first decided to make a plate featuring both the shells and the vast bridge I just crossed.  A 90mm Nikkor lens was used to achieve this with satisfactory, to me, results.  For the second plate, an 8in 1857 C. C. Harrison Petzval was used in order to throw the focus off a bit, and emphasize some of the blades of grass on the hill alongside rivers edge. 

  In Alabama I was rather fond of Bienville square in the middle of Mobile, and the fountain again called for the use of my trusty 90mm.  I decided to challenge myself exposure-wise, and placed the sun directly behind the second top pool, pointing the lens right toward it, so my subject is entirely backlit.  After developing the first plate, which was executed at f11 with 20sec exposure, I was overjoyed to not only find detail in the black ironworks, but also to see clear separation between the sky and the water on very top of the fountain.  For my second tintype on that location I chose to once again go to the Harrison Petzval to focus on the cross, erected there in 1909 by the Alabama Chapter of the National Society of Colonial Dames. 

  After that it was back to New Orleans.  I found the hustle and bustle of Bourbon Street to be too overwhelming at night, filled with cacophony and inebriation, but in the daytime it was rather nice, and so I set up on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans streets to make a few more tintypes.  As the light was fading, a group of travelers showed up, and kindly posed for my last tintype at that location. 

  In Houston, I stopped by the San Jacinto Museum.  Located on historic battlefield where Texas gained it's independence from Mexico, it has an impressive 567.31ft obelisk, which wasn't easy to make look interesting and different in a single frame, but I did try my best to do that. The wind really did do a number on the chemistry in this plate.  Generally I would have tossed this plate and made another attempt, but somehow, unlike in most cases with dirty plates, I think the artifacts work with the subject here rather than against it. 

  While washing the above plate, I noticed that through the trees surrounding museum grounds, I could see an enormous flame of a gas mining facility, and thought to myself that I just might be able to make it within a shot range of it right at sunset, which would let me capture some of the clouds as well as accentuate the flame, and maybe even retain a bit of detail in the post-industrial landscape that gas mining places afford in droves. I used a 400mm Tele-Fujinon for these images, and at f11 these exposures were 10 and 50sec, as the post-sunset light was fading fast, and I wanted the second image to be a bit brighter than the first.

  During the night, I made it all the way to the entrance of Big Bend National Park, which borders Mexico along the Rio Grand.  There's some great wilderness and geography there, and it's definitely worth visiting, especially with more time on one's hands to spend there.   At the first location I only made one tintype, using a Schneider 150mm lens, before taking a dip in the river and cooling off.  This was the hottest day of my travels, and my car thermometer showed all the way up to 98F when I got back in after washing this plate and wrapping up the dark box and chemistry.

  Instead of calling it quits due to heat, I decided to drive about a bit more, wait for the air two drop at least a couple of degrees, and made it to the second Rio Grand overlook, where I could once again capture two countries at once in my compositions.  Finding a nice bluff that offered ample perspective, I chose the 210mm Fujinon for the view down the river, before switching to 400mm Tele-Fujinon for the upstream view.  I think while the compositions of the last two plates here are indeed very similar, I did make the second plate for a very specific reason.  The viewer may be pleasantly surprised to find one small addition within the last frame, an addition that occurred naturally, and which is a relative rarity to be captured in tintype format.

  I apologize to the viewers for the slight mismanaging of the color balance of the above tintype copies.  For some reason my copy camera (i.e. my iPhone) decided to play tricks on me this time.  Regardless though, I am happy with my little wet plate haul from this trip, and with being able to add another three states to my having visited list, now only Alaska and 4 southeastern-most states remain unexplored. 

  I'll leave you all with a call to action.  No, not the usual "support us on Patreon" stuff we're all used, to, although if someone wished to purchase one or more of the above tintypes, they are indeed for sale (with prices ranging from $250 to $400), but with a strong suggestion to go to Austin as soon as possible.   Why Austin, you may ask?  Well, because there, within the walls of Harry Ransom Center, you can find the very first photograph ever taken, and be in it's overpowering presence.   I say overpowering, because after having seen it in so many history books, having learned about the ling and frustrating path the led Niepce toward his fist successes, which he dubbed Heliograph, it is truly marvelous to be able to stand just a foot away from the actual plate that gave him the first surviving semblance of chemical image.  By golly what a treat, go and see it as soon as possible.  The installation that surrounds it is rather robust, but I don't know how much longer this seminal work will remain on public display.  The metal plate is larger than you would imagine, and the image itself is nearly impossible to see, save for when it's lit just right, and even then only on parts and at varied angles.  Due to that, there are many variations of the image online, because most all images you'll see online or in print have been heavily altered view editing in order to make the image make sense, and when I just googled it, the overzealous AI answer for first image ever was even artificially colored for some baffling reason.  No, go stand next to that plate yourself, and you'll see what I mean - the precursor to so much great art is waiting to be seen by you live!

  As always, happy shooting and until next adventures,

Anton