Daguerreotype Camera: Fixing Light onto a Silver Plate
Explore the 1839 Giroux daguerreotype camera through focus, cap exposure, silver-plate results, and mercury safety.
Enter it as a device that sees light and keeps it on a silver plate
The daguerreotype camera is a device where an optical machine that forms an image inside a wooden box and the chemistry that fixes that image onto a silver plate run as one continuous process.
Technical background: Daguerreotype process .
First read the whole process and confirm that focusing, loading the plate, exposure, development, and fixing all lead to the very same silver plate.
Camera-box process
Decide the subject and get ready to read the scene in front of the camera on the ground glass.
1View2Focus3Plate4Light5Hg6Fix
First change to watchStart by focusingThe inner box moves and the ground-glass focal plane responds.On the first action, watch how the box camera changes distance to form the image.
How is it easiest to split the flow that keeps an image in this camera?