This past weekend I took a quick trip to New York. While I was there I happened to see Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840–1940, a special exhibition at The Met. While it was a fascinating show and I saw lots of beautiful albumen and salted paper prints, there was an unfortunate lack of daguerreotypes. Perhaps I missed them or they were in another room but I was a little disappointed…

On the plane I managed to finish reading A. Bisbee’s The History and Practice of Daguerreotyping (1853). It’s a short book of a little over 100 pages that contains Bisbee’s methods and opinions of the daguerreotype process as well as a couple short essays on heliochromy (naturally colored daguerreotypes) and the collodion process (wet plate, ambrotype, tintype, etc.). He is much more succinct (and opinionated) in his description of the process than Humphrey. It might be easier for someone starting out to read this work before embarking on Humphrey’s hand book. The history component is interesting but I don’t think it’s all that accurate, though I’m no authority. It does, however, say that the ‘lavender’ light I found so funny was termed by Sir John Herschel (p. 23).

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been on the quest for rubylith. I figured I could just pick some up in town but that was unfortunately not the case. A couple of the people I asked said ‘what in the world to you need that old stuff for?!?’ and one person got all teary-eyed and nostalgic over their long lost rubylith days. I finally resorted to buying a roll off ebay. So if anyone needs rubylith, I’ll have plenty soon.

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