Re: Anyone given Color Daguerreotypes a try?

The technique you describe is an adaptation of the method
used by Fox Talbot in his patent applied for in 1841.
The phenomenon was also discovered independently by
Kratochwila in Vienna and later by Francis R. Wells
who applied for a patent using heat as the developer.
As it turned out, the image was much weaker than the
silver image of the Daguerreotype and was abandoned.
There were attempts at using the image as a basis for
making etchings.

Colors appear on the plate, however, they have no
relationship to the spectra which created the image.

The Hillotype was the first photographic means by
which a record of nature's colors appeared in the image
with any degree of accuracy and could remain in the
daylight without fading. This was in the early part of
the 1850's. Levi Hill's process is not a Daguerreotype,
yet, the technique does use the Daguerreotype plate as it's
foundation.

Fifty years later, two processes could reproduce
natural colors in the lab with good results. One is
the Nobel Prize winning process of Gabriel
Lippmann. And the other is a little know process
which creates colors by Micro-Dispersion. Sometimes
spoken of as the Spectral-Dispersion process.

-phillip

Jeff Sumner wrote:

> >From the back of an old Daguerreotype manual:
>
> [quote]
> COLORED DAGUERREOTYPES ON COPPER.--To effect this, take a polished plate of
> copper and expose it to the vapor of iodine, or bromine, or the two
> substances combined; or either of them in combination with chlorine. This
> gives a sensitive coating to the surface of the plate, which may then be
> submitted to the action of light in the camera. After remaining a sufficient
> time in the camera, the plate is taken out and exposed to the vapor of
> sulphuretted hydrogen. This vapor produces various colors on the plate,
> according to the intensity with which the light has acted on the different
> parts; consequently a colored photographic picture is obtained. No further
> process is necessary as exposure to light does not effect the picture.
> By this process we have an advantage over the silvered plate, both in
> economy, and in the production of the picture in colors.
> [/quote]
>
> Anyone give it a go? What colors, exactly? Doesn't sound like the color
> process that someone else was trying to perfect at the time, and it most
> CERTAINLY isn't the Polaroid answer to the color problem.
>
> It _is_ interesting, though.
> JD
Received on Sun Jun 20 12:03:58 2004