I went for a jaunt in the countryside today, took a drive up to Harpers Ferry. On the way home, I stopped off at an antiques mall and found a lovely 1/4 plate daguerreotype for $95. No case, but the image, the mat and the glass were all in excellent condition, with the packet still well sealed, so no major oxidation or fading. I'm going to shop around for a modern replica case for it to better protect it.

TheFlyingCamera

Well, not exactly, but I did give my wet plate demo and discussion yesterday at Artomatic. I used a box brownie for the camera, and coated my plates on some black glass cut down to the brownie's size - 3 3/4 x 4 1/2. We were getting the exposure pretty close on the third plate, but I ran out of developer. The bigger success was just being able to demonstrate the process, and have an interested audience. There were six folks in all who came for the program, and all left interested in the process....

TheFlyingCamera

I scored a beautiful condition 1930s vintage Brownie #3 box camera for $5. It produces a rather large negative (I think something near 4x5, maybe 3 1/4 x 4 1/4), and of course original roll film is not available for it anymore, so I'll use it for shooting wet-plate. Thinking of which...

I'm doing a demo of wet-plate at Artomatic. I'm going to use the Brownie to do the plates, so I can have something cheap and easy to work on, and less to haul around. Now I need to construct a dark...

TheFlyingCamera