Another Ottawa church: St bridgid's

This is the crudest of the images shown, but it is also one of the most interesting to me. It is so clearly hand made, now thats a photograph eh? It is a simple iodized plate that was polished with silvo on a home electroplated bit of plumbing copper. Despite that rough and ready ancestry, the image is vigorous and reasonably long in tonal scale. The presence of the taxis in the bottom right and the advertising billboard has always been a little bit of fun when looking at this otherwise primitive image.

Note: Daguerreotype plates could be sensitized with other halogen elements too, the addition of bromine on a plate would greatly increase the sensitivity and strength of the recorded image. Usually the plate was over the iodine , then the bromine and back over the iodine. Elemental bromine is terrifying stuff. Do not play with it. Further refinements to the process were the use of gold toning solutions, this results in a "magic mirror" that involves the use of all three of the alchemists "nopble" metals - very romantic. The use of gold increased the resistance of the image to abrasion and softened the chalky blue colour that was so often achieved (partly due to overexposure.) Getting good plates and polishing them right is everything. I electroplated my own copper for a while (cyanide is required) and then paid someone else to make them for me. I never got it right.