Gregory Blank wrote:
Or you could just coat the glass with some colloiden
nitrate and fume that.

In article ,
Donald Qualls wrote:


For a lot less than $8 per plate, I can buy Schott 2 mm glass precut to
9x12 cm size, chemically silver it, sensitize it with iodine and bromine
vapor, and have modernized Daguerreotype plates on which to experiment
with developing in modern chemicals instead of mercury vapor. I could
pay back the investment for fuming boxes and other necessary equipment
long before I'd go through that 100 plate minimum order -- and the
images I'd produce would be much more memorable and saleable, if I 'm so
inclined, than a glass plate negative or ambrotype equivalent.



I presume you're talking about the sensitizing process for wet plates --
or are you after the collodion dry plate process that failed to fly in
the 1870s because gelatin dry plates were safer and cheaper to make?

Either way, to sensitize the plate you have to first embed sodium
chloride and/or bromide in the collodion, then apply silver nitrate to
form the silver halide in place, because silver halide isn't soluble;
for wet plates, you then have to expose and process before the
collodion's carrier (the ether) evaporates completely, rendering the
collodion impervious to the water that carries the developer; I don't
know for certain how development was carried out on collodion dry
plates, but sensitizing was about the same.

Fuming works on the silver plate for a Daguerreotype by forming the
bromide and iodide directly in place on the surface of the silver; it
won't work with a surface that doesn't incorporate a high percentage of
metallic silver (and even then the surface has to be immaculately clean
-- 80% of the work in making a traditional Dag is in the burnishing of
the silver layer on the copper plate).

Point being, however (back to original topic), if enough people boycott
film producers, we hasten the day when film isn't produced any more.

Sure, that's not likely to be tomorrow, but I'd miss Kodak products even
while I was shooting Foma, Efke, and Lucky -- and who knows how long
Foma and Efke can stay in business without the billion potential
customers who can't afford anything else that Lucky starts with...

--
I may be a scwewy wabbit, but I'm not going to Alcatwaz!
-- E. J. Fudd, 1954

Donald Qualls, aka The Silent Observer
Lathe Building Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/HomebuiltLathe.htm
Speedway 7x12 Lathe Pages http://silent1.home.netcom.com/my7x12.htm

Opinions expressed are my own -- take them for what they're worth
and don't expect them to be perfect.