original daguerreotype of a little girl taken over 1 1/2 centuries ago
Toronto. These days of digital cameras and smartphones make photography a piece of cake. You see it; you shoot it; you send it. Easy Peasey. But it wasn’t always the case. Many of those who haunt our fairs and shows enjoy the retro photography of the days of film.
Some even dabble in wet plate photography and salt paper or albumen prints. The really daring take a shot at making Daguerreotypes from scratch.
I bought this original daguerreotype portrait c1845 of a little girl around 1976 from Bill Marshall of Deux Montagnes, Quebec. The case cover was missing. NB. The daguerreotype has 90 degree corners, not the slight distortion shown here. The flesh tone in the middle right is my hand holding my iPod Touch as I took this image. The sharpness was affected by my hand held shot and slightly corrected with the focus plug-in (Focus Magic) that I use with Affinity Photo.
Modern day Daguerreian photographers are truly rare. In fact, there are only around a half dozen serious Daguerreian photographers in the world according to a friend of mine,
Dr Mike Robinson here in Toronto is one of the very few practitioners of the art that dates back to the very earliest days of photography when Louis Daguerre was collaborating with Nicéphore Niépce to create images by the action of natural light. The Daguerreotype is one of the earliest (January 1839) processes for photographs. The image is created in-camera on a silver-plated copper plate coated with a light sensitive emulsion. The resulting positive latent image is ‘developed’ outside the camera via mercury vapour.
And the post title? It was used by Charlie Chaplin as the name of his 1936 movie. Never seen it? What are you waiting for? It is a classic! Here is a sample.
