An Afternoon with Race Gentry, Learning Daguerrotypes
featuring Anton Orlov.
Hey guys! This post is a late one, but better late than never! Last week a friend of mine, Race Gentry, invited me to learn to learn how to do Daguerreotypes at another friends studio (Anton).
Equipment We Used.
Here are the steps we used to make Daguerreotypes:
Polish the silver with green powdered rouge using a sander.
Polish plates with red powdered rouge using a sander.
After using a sander we poured a little bit of 190 proof alcohol and polished the plates with a super fine powder called Linde “A” Polish (using a cotton ball with the alcohol already on the plate).
Plates were buffed on a buckskin buffing board with fine powdered red oxide.
Then buffed on a German velveteen buffing board with lamp black.
Then the plate is buffed a third time on clean velveteen buffing board.
After making sure the plate was buffed and shining (very much most like a mirror) we moved over to Antons darkroom where Race set up his Iodine box and air fuming hood and mercury pot (we were working outside to not get the darkroom dirty)
7. Placed the plate silver side down over the exposed fumes (of Iodine) from the Iodine box till you can see a nice gold color tone on the plate.
After the plate was exposed, it was time to shoot! My first original photo was of Anton but the exposure was off and he moved during the 1 minute exposure! The exposure times are for sure something that I’m not used to, so I know if I were to explore more of the Daguerreotype world, it’s something I have to pay close attention to when learning. Every time you want to redo an image and use the same plate , you wipe off the image and you repeat steps 1-7.
And that’s what exactly Race and I did.
The image I ended up getting for that day was of one of the backside of Antons studio.
8. Development time. I decided to develop the image by using the Becquerel method. Which is using a Rubylith film slip. We left the plate in the slip for around 45 minutes to 1 hour.
9. We then fixed the plate using Sodium Thiosulfate.
10. Then gilded with Gold Chloride and sodium thiosulfate.
After working with the wet plate process for years and doing this was a bit of a reality check to me. Daguerreotypes are hard. The prep time for these can take awhile and it makes me appreciate how with wet plate how everything can be quick when you know what your doing.
I hope to be doing more of these in the future!