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

Well, the new silver bath is set up and running. I couldn't be happier with it, as it does everything you could expect it to do, and looks beautiful to boot. It inspires me to become a better woodworker every time I look at it.

I think I finally have my process under control - I was having severe veiling in addition to the problems I had with the darkslide scraping my plates. Well, with switching to the 11x14 plates, which properly fit my plate holders, I cured the scraping problem....

TheFlyingCamera

I ordered a silver bath for my wet-plate work from Steve Silipigni, in Rochester, NY. Steve does terrific work and maintains great communication with his customers - he calls/emails at each phase in the process, and asked me several questions about how I wanted the box made (I had an 11x14 box, and he made it so the 14" dimension was the horizontal, so it would be easier to insert and remove the plates in a darkbox or under a low ceiling). I can't recommend him enough. I'll post photos of the...

TheFlyingCamera