Brief overview of the daguerreotype process and an interview with Mike Robinson

[Fragomeni]

I spent some time earlier this month up in Toronto at Mike Robinson's daguerreotype studio. We did a three-day 1:1 workshop going deep into the mercurial daguerreotype process to help get me up to speed on the many nuances of the process (I've been working mainly in Becquerel since taking it up) while I'm waiting on the completion of some of my equipment (Mike is building a lot of it for me). I had an amazing time and put together this little video to share a brief overview of the process as well as a short interview with Mike. This was a fantastic experience and it was a lot of fun putting this little video together as well. Enjoy.

YouTube link: Making Daguerreotypes with Dr. Mike Robinson (https://youtu.be/TaAr4HtjLdM)

[Oren Grad]

Lucky man! :)

This is marvelous, thanks for sharing. Only quibble is that the audio volume is quite low despite having the YouTube volume setting at max and the volume control on my speaker at max. Perhaps a quirk of my system, though other YouTube videos play at full blast with the same settings.

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

Thank you for the video, and good luck with the process! I have been at it for 20 years, and am still in awe when I see a Daguerreotype. Its a totally unforgiving process, but the rewards are spectacular. I have one of Mike's original mercury pots, and they are wonderful tools. I imagine that the new ones are even better.

[Fragomeni]

Lucky man! :)

This is marvelous, thanks for sharing. Only quibble is that the audio volume is quite low despite having the YouTube volume setting at max and the volume control on my speaker at max. Perhaps a quirk of my system, though other YouTube videos play at full blast with the same settings.

Thanks Oren. And I think the volume issue is your setup. I've tested it on multiple devices and systems and volume is normal on all.


Thank you for the video, and good luck with the process! I have been at it for 20 years, and am still in awe when I see a Daguerreotype. Its a totally unforgiving process, but the rewards are spectacular. I have one of Mike's original mercury pots, and they are wonderful tools. I imagine that the new ones are even better.

Thanks Jason. I dug through some notes of yours from a long while back (shared on an old site of yours - don't have the link on hand now) as well as posts on Cdags as I was getting into Becquerel and priming my brain for mercurial. It's nice to be able to look back in time and see how others were working out the process at different stages. If you every wanna let that mercury pot go you let me know :D And yea, the development of his boxes and the new mercury apparatus is quite impressive. The boxes are beautiful with really fantastic tactile feedback and the mercury apparatus is very portable and solves a lot around having to deal with liquid mercury in a pot. With the daylight construction, it all becomes the ultimate setup to take on the road, which I definitely intend to do at some point.