Going Back in Time:
I set a challenge for my camera group to shoot to produce effects like those of the early days of photography. These first two compare the look of a Daguerreotype with its competitor, the Calotype from the Englishman Fox-Talbot. The history of the development of these two systems is a complex one, and fraught with competition, and an added layer of artistic nationalism on the part of the French government.
In the end, Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre could claim the first commercially viable photographic process, and his success was recognized and purchased by the French government on August 19th, 1839, when the government purchased the process to offer free to the world, with the exception of England - with which it was in unending competition.
In the UK, Henry Fox-Talbot, a rich polymath, had developed his own photographic process but had been distracted until it became clear that Daguerre would bring his process to the world.
While the Daguerreotype produced works that even today are hard to rival in terms of detail and clarity, they were direct recorded on an emulsion on metal plates, and thus unreproducible. They actually contained both a negative and positive image, so depending on the angle one viewed them from they could reverse, almost like a hologram. Fox-Talbot's system used paper negatives from which multiple positive copies could be made, although they were must less sharp, a characteristic that some liked for its painterly effect.
In the long term, as technology improved both processes, the Daguerreotype dominated for most of the 1840's, but improvements to the principles of the negative system eventually surpassed that of Daguerre's invention and led to the negative system we still use for film today.
The following image is an attempt to emulate as much as possible the look of a Daguerreotype in terms of clarity. It's almost impossible to get the shiny gloss of a metal printed surface.
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This less sharp and distinct image is a bit more like that of an early Calotype image from the early 1840's
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