Whole Plate
It has been some time since the last posting. Things have been very busy and very good. This year will go down as my best year so far. My son was born, I became a citizen, had my first really big solo show, and will be closing on a new house by mid december. Progress with the daguerreotypes has been steady but a bit slow for me. The process does not like to be rushed and requires a very strict and meticulous ritual to get the plates to cooperate.
Since deciding to galvanize ALL plates from now on, there has been another treacherous step to the final product and it has been very frustrating. After much trial and error and fussing, I think I see a bit of light at the end the tunnel. To date I have only done immersion galvanization with a concentrated hypo solution with silver chloride dissolved into it. The cyanide solution requires a rectifier but for now and so far the hypo solution seems to be giving me stronger more defined images. Issues in the beginning were tiny flecks of crap that smeared with buffing and the trial and error with the amount and thickness of the additional silver.
For the shot of the Deardorff looking at dags, there were a few attempts on different days. The last attempt revealed the amount of galvanization and the amount of buffing to get good results with no smeared flecks. The one issue last night was small black spots but those are usually attributed to the lamp black or unfiltered gold chloride. I think I got a pretty damn good plate and I hope it gets into the 2013 Image Object exhibit at the Center for Alternative Photography, NYC.
I scanned the plate with the cover glass on it so it has some strange banding on the right side and I didn’t bother to remove the dust digitally. There is no way a scan will ever come close seeing a daguerreotype in person
whole plate daguerreotype