Alternate means of developing Daguerreotype?

I'm just full of ideas about age-old processes. Lately, I've been

wondering about Dagrerreotypy, inspired by Anno's thread concerning

the dangers of working with bromine, chlorine, and mercury to produce

a photographic image.

I've wondered about this in a couple ways. First, I've been thinking

that it should be possible to produce a Daguerreotype image on a

silver coating without the copper substrate -- that was used in

Daguerre's day because it was easy to chemically plate silver onto

copper, by simply suspending a clean copper plate in a silver nitrate

solution and burnishing down the resulting bloom of silver

microcystals. Daguerre's work, however, predated the invention of a

simple method of coating silver onto glass -- a method that can now be

obtained at semi-reasonable price in the form of two pump spray

bottles and applied to chemically clean glass in a matter of minutes.

Combine this method of producing a highly polished, unoxidized layer

of silver on an inexpensive substrate with modern methods of

developing a latent image in silver halides, and one might have the

basis of a modern form of Daguerreotypy that uses less hazardous

chemicals, but still preserves the appearance of the colloidal silver

on polished silver image that gave Daguerreotypes their special "depth".

Yes, there would still be the need to deal with iodine and bromine,

and possibly chlorine as well, but these carry far less long term

hazards than mercury -- and modern developers would allow producing an

image in the same time frame as mercury, with no more additional

hazard than the Becquerel method of long term exposure to red light.

Moreso, modern developers enhance the sensitivity of the silver salts,

and might shorten the exposure time reqired to produce the image to

less than the few seconds needed with mercury development (Becquerel

development is said to require much longer exposures).

Is anyone aware of work done with latent images created with

Daguerre's methods, but developed in modern film or paper developers?

Really interesting post Donald. I think we should wait until a chemist gets to your post and tells you if that´s possible or not.

Maybe, as daguerreotypy is a small thing arround the globe, and you can count with your hands the people that practices it, there´s no big demand for an improvment in the process. Aldough Spagnolli got really impressive results in his work (studio portraits, artificial lighting, 8x10 plates).

Any chemist arround?.

<i>Maybe, as daguerreotypy is a small thing arround the globe, and you can count with your hands the people that practices it, there´s no big demand for an improvment in the process.</i><p>

My thinking has been that only a literal handful of people worldwide are making daguerreotypes on a regular basis because of the hazards and environmental issues with mercury -- the Becquerel method is reputed to be inferior in every way except for being non-toxic, and regular use of mercury fuming apparatus, short of a vacuum evaporator that recaptures unreacted mercury vapor, is likely to result in actual arrest for creating environmental hazards if done in significant volume, even aside the extremely serious long term effects of exposure to mercury.<p>

Yet I find the look of a daguerreotype very attractive -- not enough so to risk permanently damaging my brain and nervous system, but certainly enough to think hard about less hazardous ways to reproduce that appearance. Iodine crystals aren't hard to obtain (though perhaps more so than before 9/11, because they're often used by people who want to blow stuff up on a small scale), while bromine and chlorine can be extracted readily from common pool and hot tub chemicals in small quantity. Silvering a glass plate is a routine operation in some circles (telescope makers). It's just a matter of putting all these bits together to see if HC-110 or D-76 can produce an effect that looks like a daguerreotype...

Donald. My experience with daguerreotypes was quite unsuccesfull. Appart from beeing a dangerous process, it´s really tricky. The polishing process takes 1 hour, and that´s 50% of the image results so to speak. If you don´t polish correcctly the plate, or if you just touch the surface with the tip of your fingers, then you´ll have to start all over again; or you woun´t get any image. There are plenty of things that can go wrong, and in the first day of our workshop, we got the first good image after 3 attempts.

Appart from beeing a tricky process, it´s quite expensive too.

But the results worth the effort of working so hard and patiently.

I tried the Iodine process, as the Bromine/iodine is much more complex.

If you try your idea, let me know how it went!!

Cheers

Agustin

I've heard reference to a toning procedure that yields similar results to a Daguerreotype. The only company that I can find that supplies a kit is Rockland Colloid. They call it Halo-Chrome but I'm not sure that the results are the same.

I had a chance to see a Daguerreotype in person at the British Museum and was quite taken aback. I doubt that the Halo-Chrome process exactly duplicates the look but the chemical smorgasboard appears safer.

http://www.rockaloid.com/products.html#halo

One advantage is that you can tone enlargements rather than being limited by negative size. I guess it might be worth a shot but I can't imagine that it would hold a candle to a real Daguerreotype.

-Jon